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Themesicon: navigation pathMapping and Texticon: navigation pathInternetmapping
 
 
 
 
 

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Internet addresses, connectivity, and bandwidth. The mapping of these elements provide important insights into who owns and controls infrastructure, who has access to the Internet, how the system can be surveyed, and how and from where the Internet is being used. At a basic level, the maps provide a visual inventory and census of where Internet nodes and routes of connection are located, and in specific cases the traffic that flows through networks and their user profiles. Depending on scale, these maps can be used by engineers to install and maintain the physical hardware of the networks, by system operators to manage networks more effectively, and by marketing and business development departments to demonstrate the size and penetration of networked services. In addition, the maps have academic utility by showing significant trends and spatial patterns in the growth of network architecture, service provision, user profiles and traffic flow across spatial scales, so for example, allowing comparison of neighborhoods, cities and countries. As such they reveal the growth of the ‹Network Society› and information economy, but also its uneven and unequal geographic nature by revealing

 

the distribution of infrastructure and those areas that have poor access to the Internet or are presently excluded altogether. Moreover, they allow an analysis of the changes occurring in these patterns. As recent research highlights, although the Internet has expanded, diversified and diffused greatly, basic infrastructure access and equity issues are still significant; the so called ‹digital divide› issue, which is played out in different ways at different spatial scales, and is fractured along lines of wealth, class, race, gender and so on.[3] The cartographic designs employed are various. Many examples use conventional approaches of shaded or symbol maps on a familiar geographic framework. These are often produced using standard geographic information systems (GIS) packages. However, other significant examples stretch the notion of a ‹map› using more diagrammatic approaches, for example showing the topology of network connections laid out in a non-geographic, abstract coordinate space. Some of the maps are interactive interfaces using the medium of the map to allow users to access and query the data in novel ways. Some of the most potentially powerful and interesting

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