week 10 - a look at how geogaphy influences or is affected by the internet.

Reading the article “How Geography Shapes—and Is Shaped by—the Internet” by Greenstein, Forman, and Goldfarb (2018) through a South African lens reveals something important: even though the authors aim to show how internet infrastructure interacts with geography in intricate ways, they still write from a perspective where connectivity, infrastructure, and English are largely taken for granted, being an constant of day-to-day life.

This isn’t a flaw in their article per se, their data, mostly U.S.-based, supports their arguments, but it does highlight just how invisible the Global South becomes in much of the literature on digital economics.

The authors use a literature review, synthesising U.S.-based empirical studies, theoretical models, and case studies. They cite firm-level adoption data, wage growth analyses across U.S. counties, and broadband availability studies (Greenstein et al., 2018). Theoretical frameworks, like models of urban agglomeration, support their arguments.

This approach is comprehensive but limited by its U.S. focus, which misses South Africa’s infrastructure and cultural complexities. Relying on secondary sources risks inheriting biases, and the qualitative discussion of globalisation lacks the rigor of other sections.

They aim to review literature on how the internet reshapes economic geography by reducing three frictions: communication costs, transportation costs, and search costs. It is argued that these reductions vary by location due to local preferences, substitutes, and complements, with it being stated that, “the Internet has different economic consequences in distinct locations because local factors shape the impact” (Greenstein et al., 2018).

The article challenges the “death of distance” model, analyses internet adoption, and explores its effects on wealth, innovation, consumer behavior, and globalisation. The internet’s rapid diffusion in the 1990s is described as transformative, reducing communication costs since “the cost of sending and receiving email… are the same, irrespective of the distance” (Greenstein et al., 2018).

Transportation costs fall for digitised goods like music, with “near-zero marginal cost,” and for physical goods by minimising travel (Greenstein et al., 2018). Search costs decrease as lower frictions enable easier comparisons. However, the “death of distance” model oversimplifies, as “some attributes may be easier to appreciate online than others” (Greenstein et al., 2018).

Adoption varies geographically, with urban areas benefiting from complements like broadband. The internet exacerbates wage inequality, boosts innovation but “balkanises” research, benefits isolated consumers, and facilitates trade, though evidence on globalisation is limited.

The authors conclude that the “death of distance” is too simplistic, calling for research into uneven outcomes. The article’s central argument is that the internet reduces three key types of economic friction, communication, transportation, and search costs, but that the benefit of this reduction varies based on local factors: preferences, access to complements (like broadband and skilled labour), and the availability of substitutes (Greenstein et al., 2018).

They push back against the idea that the internet automatically leads to a “death of distance,” instead showing that pre-existing inequalities are often amplified, not erased (Greenstein et al., 2018). In South Africa, this is not just true, for us it’s painfully familiar.

The article notes that rural and small-city areas are theoretically best positioned to gain from internet adoption, because they suffer most from communication and distribution frictions. But they also face the highest barriers to adoption, due to weak infrastructure and a lack of digital complements (Greenstein et al., 2018).

For example, 30.6% of South African households had no access to the internet via any device in 2021, with rural provinces like Limpopo and Eastern Cape recording some of the lowest connectivity levels (StatsSA, 2022a). These are precisely the areas where improved access could yield the highest returns but where access remains structurally limited.

The authors describe how the productivity and wage benefits of advanced internet services in the U.S. were concentrated in only 6% of counties, which were already the wealthiest (Greenstein et al., 2018). That statistic could almost be lifted and dropped into South Africa’s digital and economic landscape, Gauteng and the Western Cape dominate access to broadband, digital skills, and remote work opportunities, while the rest of the country lags behind (ICASA, 2022).

The article sees this as a “payoff puzzle,” but in South Africa, it is less a puzzle than a direct result of apartheid-era spatial planning and ongoing inequality in infrastructure investment.

One major blind spot in the article, however, is its lack of engagement with language and cultural context. It makes no mention of how the dominance of English online might serve as a barrier in multilingual societies. In South Africa, only 8.4% of the population speaks English as a home language, while isiZulu (24.4%), isiXhosa (16.3%), Afrikaans (12.1%), and Setswana (8.2%) are all more widely spoken (StatsSA, 2022b).

Yet English continues to dominate both the official communications and the digital landscape, creating a disconnect between digital platforms and the linguistic realities of most South Africans.

When the article discusses the decline in search and communication costs, it does so in economic terms, how easier access to information improves productivity or consumer choice. But in South Africa, search costs are also linguistic and epistemic. Information may be technically available, but if it’s in English and embedded in culturally foreign frameworks, it is often inaccessible in practice.

This problem is compounded by the internet’s text-heavy, screen-based design, which does not reflect how knowledge has historically been communicated in many African contexts. Oral storytelling, communal memory, and face-to-face exchange remain central to how information is shared, especially in rural and traditional settings. The web simply isn’t built with that in mind.

Even in sections where the article discusses e-commerce and online consumer behaviour, arguing that the internet allows for greater choice, particularly in geographically isolated areas (Greenstein et al., 2018), it misses how South Africans in those areas often use the internet differently. WhatsApp and Facebook dominate usage, not Amazon or niche e-commerce platforms.

Data costs remain among the highest globally when adjusted for income, and digital literacy varies widely depending on education, age, and access to guidance, which are unfortunately affected by race and gender due to historical injustices within the country such as apartheid.

Due to algorithms some demographics may not receive the same information as another which may limit them, intentionally or not through omission of opportunity or knowledge.

The article closes with recommendations for future research, such as studying the geographic rollout of platforms like Craigslist or ride-sharing services like Uber (Greenstein et al., 2018). These are interesting proposals, but in a South African context, the questions need to be more foundational. For us, the pressing issue isn’t how ride-sharing affects employment, it’s whether young people in rural areas even have access to job listings online in their language, or whether they can afford data to apply. I'd wager this language gap may also inhibit their ability to fully read through the contracts they sign with these ride-sharing platforms, especially if English is not the person's mother tongue. The “future” of digital infrastructure in South Africa is still very much in the present tense, still unfinished, still deeply unequal.

So what does this mean for us, the people living on the ground? It means that while Greenstein et al.'s (2018) article offers a useful framework for understanding the spatial consequences of internet diffusion, it ultimately remains blind to the lived experience of marginalised, multilingual societies like South Africa. It does not consider what it means to be digitally connected when your language isn’t supported, when your access is mobile-only, and when your digital experience is shaped by historical dispossession and economic exclusion.

In this context, digital transformation is not just about cables and signals, it is about reclaiming space, language, and visibility online. One may oppose this by saying that google translate may assist in bridging language barriers and they would not be entirely wrong, but the fact remains that the technology is not developed or curated by the people speaking that language in their day-to-day, or rather there is too little oversight from that group instead acting as a form of soft colonialism. If the internet is to serve South Africans meaningfully, it must be decolonised. That means creating local language content, designing inclusive interfaces, and supporting community-owned infrastructure models. It means centering the oral and the relational in digital design.

References

• Greenstein, S., Forman, C., and Goldfarb, A., 2018. How Geography Shapes—and Is Shaped by—the Internet. In: G.L. Clark, M.P. Feldman, M.S. Gertler, and D. Wójcik, eds. The New Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• StatsSA, 2022a. General Household Survey 2021. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa. https://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0318/P03182021.pdf
• ICASA, 2022. State of the ICT Sector in South Africa 2022. Pretoria: Independent Communications Authority of South Africa. https://www.nab.org.za/news/entry/state-of-ict-sector-report-march-2022
• StatsSA, 2022b. General Household Survey 2022. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa. https://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0318/P03182022.pdf
• Cailliau, R. (1995) A Little History of the World Wide Web. World Wide Web Consortium.