Cyberspace is geographical because it has the ability to bring people together in a common “place”. Place is not necessarily a static place, you must look at the space of place in a dynamic point of view. Cyberspace is not contained, it creates a global sense of place; a virtual community. In these online communities there is not actual space, but relational space, spaces that are created online. These spaces can take the form of message boards, forums and chat rooms; geographically located in cyberspace. What I am essentially saying is that cyberspace and meatspace are one. To form a community in cyberspace you must have the same ingredients as you would in the geographical sense of real world communities. The thing that correlates cyberspace with geographical space is common interest. I believe that communities will begin to form more on propinquity rather than on place. It is common that people gather together based on interests and cyberspace is making that much more possible in today’s world. Therefore cyberspace is not only creating real place geographical closeness, but just as much if not more virtual world geographical closeness.
In the traditional sense of geography we think of location as absolute location now with the internet and telecommunications we think of location as a relative place. In the traditional sense people gather together at functions, an absolute location. An example of this here in Valparaiso would be the annual Popcorn Festival. This in a traditional sense it is a regional gathering of people. This would be time biased, it brings people together at a given local, but past present and future are all one. Something such as this is very traditional and rooted in place. Events like this will never change being that you cannot stop human interaction, but space bias events are growing extremely fast with in the internet and telecommunications world.
A space biased example is when people are brought together at a certain time in space, but the place does not matter. Meaning everyone can be sitting in front of their computer, but be at the same virtual placing that the same time. An example of this would be some of the community network sites we visited,like the Fort Collins home page. This is the Fort Collins community webpage. This is an example of how telecommunications are changing the traditional sense of geography. Here if you live anywhere within the Fort Collins area, you are able to search for people with your own interests. By doing this is further shows how interests are becoming the catalyst at brings people together and it is only excelled by the internet. Further examples can be shown on many sites, more specifically the online community that I am a part of, Full Size Bronco Members, this is a community broughttogether because of common interests. Internet technologies is again the main factor here, this is a community that would have never formed if it was not for telecommunications.