Internet and Global Capitalism

Abstract

While mainstream understandings of the Internet's impact on the global economy have long focused on processes like offshoring, deskilling, financialization, and the so‐called death of distance, geographers focus on more situated understandings of the relationship between the Internet and global capitalism. Rather than rendering dominant social and spatial relationships obsolete, the Internet has facilitated a more modest, but still significant, reconfiguration of these social and economic processes. This includes the evolving role of some locations as hubs of the Internet's material infrastructure, the emergence of new kinds of digital goods and services, and the augmentation of conventional industries such as finance and logistics. Thus, while enabling some changes, the Internet and the economic relations built around it are firmly embedded in long‐standing historical and geographical contexts influencing their shape and form.