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The use of the term the information age to describe the period that we now fmd ourselves living in is open to misinterpretation. Society has always been based on exchanging information, and our libraries have long been rieh sources of vast of readily available information; it is information technologies that have quantities changed rapidly sinee the invention of the digital computer. These technologies are themselves products of long-term societal processes: The eeonomic desire to shorten the time that lapses between produetion and consumption of eommodities, annihilating space with time; the political desire to control such large-scale sys tems as commodity ehains, nations, and the military; and the human desire to lib erate ourselves from the constraints of our loeal daily lives. They also have had profound effeets on societal proeesses. One of the most widely discussed effeets, and a eonsistent theme of this volume, is that the information age is bringing about the end of geographie al distance as a signifieant baITier ofhuman interaction. This claim underlies prognostications about the information age: That this will be the age of globalization; of the global village; of the liberation of human inter action from the tyranny of space; of the dissolution of cities and workplaces; of the plugged-in soeiety; and of the surveillance society. If these prognostications were true, then the topie of aceessibility would indeed be a disappearing research pro gram and this book a marker of its disappearance.
List of contents
1. Information, Place, Cyberspace, and Accessibility.- I: Conceptualization and Measurement.- 2. Conceptualizing and Measuring Accessibility within Physical and Virtual Spaces.- 3. Evaluating Intra-metropolitan Accessibility in the Information Age: Operational Issues, Objectives, and Implementation.- 4. Transportation, Telecommunications, and the Changing Geography of Opportunity.- 5. Space, Time and Sequencing: Substitution at the Physical / Virtual Interface.- 6. The Fuzzy Logic of Accessibility.- 7. The E-merging Geography of the Information Society: From Accessibility to Adaptability.- II: Visualization and Representation.- 8. Representing and Visualizing Physical, Virtual and Hybrid Information Spaces.- 9. Who's Up? Global Interpersonal Temporal Accessibility.- 10. The Role of the Real City in Cyberspace: Understanding Regional Variations in Internet Accessibility.- 11. Accessibility to Information within the Internet: How can it Be Measured and Mapped?.- 12. Towards Spatial Interaction Models of Information Flows.- 13. Application of a CAD-based Accessibility Model.- 14. Human Extensibility and Individual Hybrid-accessibility in Space-time: A Multi-scale Representation Using GIS.- III: Societal Issues.- 15. Accessibility and Societal Issues in the Information Age.- 16. Reconceptualizing Accessibility.- 17. Revisiting the Concept of Accessibility: Some Comments and Research Questions.- 18. Legal Access to Geographic Information: Measuring Losses or Developing Responses?.- 19. Qualitative GIS: To Mediate, Not Dominate.- IV: Conclusion.- 20. From Sustainable Transportation to Sustainable Accessibility: Can We Avoid a New Tragedy of the Commons?.- Figures.- Tables.- Author Index.- Contributors.
