Representing and Visualizing Physical, Virtual and Hybrid Information Spaces

The strongest convention in contemporary geographic thought is the notion that geographic space is rooted in a Euclidean geometry that defines the physical world. Although geographers have long sought to escape this paradigm through a rich array of perceptions based on ways in which we might imagine space, physical distance or its economic surrogates still provide the basic logic used by geographers to order their world and to make sense of the way activities locate in time and space. There is however a sea change in the making. As the world moves from one organized around energy to one based on information, the role of physical distance is changing as it is complemented by near instantaneous transactions which dramatically distort the effect of distance, thus changing the traditional bonds which have led to the current geographical organization of cities, regions and nation states (Cairncross, 1997).