internetand

Internetand is a concept used in discussions of digital geography to describe the interaction between internet infrastructure, online activity, and physical space. It emphasizes that connectivity and online life are not abstract quantities but are grounded in places, boundaries, and spatial practices. The term is used to analyze how networks are planned, deployed, and experienced across urban, rural, and peri-urban environments, and how governance, policy, and market forces shape those patterns.

Origin and usage: The term emerged in academic and policy conversations in the 2010s as researchers and planners sought a shorthand for mapping internet access to geographic location. It is often employed in studies of digital inclusion, infrastructure investment, and spatial planning to highlight the nonuniform distribution of connectivity and the ways places become nodes or edges in a broader digital network.

Scope and components: Internetand encompasses physical infrastructure (fiber, wireless networks, data centers), service delivery (availability, pricing, and quality of service), governance (regulation, spectrum policy, municipal programs), socioeconomic impacts (economic development, education, health), and data governance (privacy, surveillance, data localization). It also considers environmental and land-use implications of network deployment.

Applications and debates: Practitioners use the concept to inform urban planning, infrastructure funding, and digital equity strategies. Critics argue that focusing on spatial aspects can overlook platform-centric governance, proprietary data, and algorithmic power, risking uneven attention to non-geographic dimensions of the internet.

Related topics include digital divide, internet governance, digital geography, and smart city planning.