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impacts on social, economic and political life, engendering widespread changes e.g. in relation to urban-regional restructuring as illustrated above.[13] The process of mapping has been used to comprehend two other sorts of projects aimed at furthering our understanding of these changes in relation to infrastructure: the digital divide; measuring the Net. As noted above, maps reveal visually the nature and extent of the ‹digital divide› in society. [14] Matthew Zook has analysed the spatiality of the Internet content production industries in the US through the detailed mapping of the geographic location of domain name registrations at different scales. Just as postal addresses in the geographic space identify a unique location, domain names perform the same function for the Internet, allowing users to visit the site. Importantly, the geographic location of the owner of these domains can be determined from registration databases, which have a billing postal address, containing zipcodes that can easily be mapped to street-level locations using offthe- shelf GIS software and map data. This mapping led Zook to conclude that the ‹Internet industry exhibits a remarkable degree of
clustering despite its reported spacelessness.›16 This approach provides a valuable quantitative measurement for policy analysis on Internet economic activity and revealing where is connected and just as importantly where is not. Despite the virtualised rhetoric, this assemblage remains embedded in real places and maps can help to reveal the intersections between cyberspace and geographic space. In academic Internet research, an understanding of that geography is important, as knowledge of the physical location of virtual phenomena can tell you interesting things (such as which territorial jurisdiction it is in) and can also enable the linkage to a large array of existing secondary data (for example socio-economic characteristics from censuses). The ‹where› and ‹how› of the physical embeddedness of data networks and information flows is also important because of their uneven global distribution and the consequent socio-spatial implications in terms of access and inequalities, as starkly revealed in. This is a global scale mapping of network infrastructure that contrasts the density of core Internet routers with the distribution of population. The maps are density