6 Towards the sustainable e-region
Ian Christie and Mark Hepworth
Introduction
Place matters: geography and the information economy
In many visions of the new economy, geography is seen as something to be transcended by technology. The electronic revolution brings about the ‘death of distance’ and ICTs free us to work anywhere, tele-commuting and connecting effortlessly with people and websites around the planet.1 Perhaps it will turn out that way; but for the moment, this vision of the irrelevance of geography is quite wrong. Place matters, and it has a significant bearing on the social and environmental sustainability of the emerging information economy. Two stories from the year 2000 illustrate this point.
In September 2000, the internet recruitment ...
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