Virtual geography

Geography and its study are changing in subtle and dramatic ways in the rapid transition to a digital world. Here we present a preliminary discussion of how this new geography, which we call 'virtual geography', might be classified. Virtual geography is not merely cyberspace per se for it comprises many types of place and space in which the digital world finds expression. We define cspace-the space within computers, cyberspace-the use of computers to communicate, and cyberplace-the infrastructure of the digital world, as key components of what Castells(1) refers to as /real virtuality'. Virtual geography is all this as well as the study of these worlds from traditional geographic perspectives. Like all classifications, the interesting questions lie at the boundaries between classes-between cspace and cyberspace, cyberspace and cyberplace, and 0 between all of these. We illustrate this variety and complexity with examples. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.