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TopNew Technologies And The Geography Of Activism And Participation
The growing centrality of the Internet and the Web has led many scholars to decode their complex architecture and, particularly in the domain of geography, their impacts and relations with spaces and places of the real-world dimension.
The Internet, as a global network of computers (Dodge & Kitchin, 2001), has been regarded as the most comprehensive information system (Kellerman, 2007) exerting a deep impact on the geographical characteristics of spaces (Brunn, 1998).
Thus, pioneering geographical researches were focused on the attempts at “mapping” cyberspace as a new geographical sphere (Dodge, 1999), seen as a (apparently) de-territorialized dimension interfering with traditional geographical spaces (Batty, 1993).
Apart from the constantly growing intersection between the physical space and the cyberspace, the Web - particularly the Web 2.0 and 3.0, based on collaborative co-creation - has spread the sense of an increasing democratization in the production and consumption of contents. The proverbial “long tail” of the Web 2.0 allows fringe/minority groups or citizens’ participatory movements to find their audience and even be economically viable (Moeller & Stone, 2013).