Geoforum 40 (2009) 523–534

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Geoforum

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Placemarks and waterlines: Racialized cyberscapes in post-Katrina Google Earth

Michael Crutcher, Matthew Zook *

University of Kentucky, Department of Geography, 1457 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 4 January 2008Received in revised form 21 January 2009

Keywords:New orleansHurricane katrinaInternetGoogleRacialized landscapesCyberscapeDigiplace

0016-7185/$ - see front matter � 2009 Elsevier Ltd. Adoi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.01.003

* Corresponding author.E-mail addresses: mcrut00@uky.edu (M. Crutcher)

a b s t r a c t

Google Earth was released a few months prior to Hurricane Katrina and became an important tool in dis-tributing information about the damage occurring in New Orleans, albeit not to all parts of society. WhileGoogle Earth did not create the economic and racial divides present in society, its use in the post-Katrinacontext reflect this gulf and have arguably reinforced and recreated it online. This paper has three mainobjectives. The first is to provide a clear empirical case study of how race remains relevant to the waypeople use (or do not use) the internet and internet based services. The second is highlighting the powerof new online and interactive mapping technologies and demonstrating how these technologies are dif-ferentially adopted. The third and final objective is illustrating how any divide in accessing digital tech-nology is not simply a one time event but a constantly moving target as new devices, software andcultural practices emerge. Thus, in addition to highlighting the racial inequalities in US society in general,Hurricane Katrina provides an important window on the way in which race remains a key factor in theaccess and use of emerging digital technologies.

� 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Calling all the people,Come back home,New Orleans is where you belongCome back to New OrleansCome back home

- Big Chief Victor Harris

On Mardi Gras Day 2006, Big Chief Victor Harris, of the Fi Yi YiMardi Gras Indian Tribe stood atop the porch of the Back StreetCultural Museum in the downtown New Orleans neighborhood,Faubourg Tremé. Overlooking a racially mixed crowd comprisedof both plain-clothed and costumed Mardi Gras revelers, andaccompanied by the rhythmic beating of drums and tambourines,Harris issued a charge to displaced New Orleanians to ‘‘come backhome”. Harris of course, was speaking of the hundreds ofthousands displaced by Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005. Anoverwhelming number of those evacuees were poor and workingclass African Americans from neighborhoods like Tremé. Harris’message was being broadcast by WWOZ, New Orleans’ communityand heritage radio station.

Transmitting at 4000 W, WWOZ’s broadcast can only be heardjust beyond the borders of Metropolitan New Orleans. Althoughsome evacuees returned to New Orleans specifically for MardiGras, Harris’ message was presumably not only heard by theassembled crowd and local radio audience but also by those across

ll rights reserved.

, zook@uky.edu (M. Zook).

the country who listen to WWOZ’s broadcast from its websitewhich regularly receives half a million hits a month (WWOZ,2008). The material context of Harris’ appeal juxtaposed to itssimultaneous cybercast poses the question of who was listening,or more critically, who knew that it was possible to listen onlineand was able to do so? This seemingly simple question leads intoa much larger discussion of how race influences the use of newtechnologies, resulting in the creation of digital landscapes andpotentially affecting how the material world is represented, nego-tiated and changed.

This paper has three main objectives. The first is highlightingthe power of new online and interactive mapping technologiesand demonstrating how the use of these technologies can createhighly differentiated connections between places and cyberspace,what we term cyberscapes. The second is providing a clear empir-ical case study of how race still remains relevant to the way peopleuse (or do not use) the internet and internet based services. WhileGoogle Earth did not create the economic and racial divides pres-ent in society, the use of its mapping services in the post-Katrinacontext reflect this gulf and have arguably reinforced and recreatedracialized cyberscapes. The third and final objective is illustratinghow any divide in accessing digital technology is not simply aone time event but a constantly moving target as new devices,software and cultural practices emerge. Thus, in addition to high-lighting the racial inequalities in US society in general, HurricaneKatrina provides an important window on the way in which raceremains a key factor in the access and use of emerging digital tech-nologies. Just as the waterlines of Katrina ebbed and flowed acrossthe racialized landscape of urban New Orleans, the bit flows and

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placemarks of Google Earth are shaped by (and help to shape) theracialized cyberscapes of the internet.

2. Cyberspace and the emergence of cyberscape

Cyberspace like any socially constructed phenomenon is a com-bination of technologies and practices whose contours and dimen-sions are continuously evolving (Zook, 2005). Beginning with theinitial distributed networks developed for communications in theadvent of a nuclear war (Abbate, 1999), cyberspace evolved intoa network of text based interaction characterized by the emailand message board applications of the 1980s, to the graphicallyrich World Wide Web (WWW) emerging in the 1990s, to theincreasingly accessible system (e.g., via mobile devices such asBlackberry and 3G phones) that characterizes it today. Accompany-ing this evolution in form has been an increase in the number anddiversity of people using it as the range of available commercialand social functions have made it ever more relevant to daily life.Indeed, cyberspace has become an integral feature of the economic,political and social lives of people around the world; providing themeans for some users to vastly expand their ability to documentand share their observations with others.

Central to this expanded voice is the rise of what has been calledWeb 2.0 applications such as blogs (user generated commentariesand essays), wikis (online resources jointly constructed and editedby any user), folksonomies (categorizations of online material basedon the aggregation of many users’ opinions), and mashups (thecombination of two or more online resources into a new hybridapplication). Although there is an element of self-serving promotionto the identification of this phenomenon, Web 2.0 represents thefracturing of larger institutions’ actors into narrower interests(e.g., network news vs. the blogosphere) and the increased abilityfor individual users and loosely affiliated networks to constructand shape cyberspace and their daily lives. In addition to changingthe nature of the production and consumption of information incyberspace, Beer and Burrows (2007) note the strong rhetoric ofdemocracy associated with Web 2.0, i.e., online content and catego-rization will come from the ‘‘people” rather than a few centralizedorganizations. Although this rhetoric is often accepted at face value,it is important to examine these claims with a more critical eye toseparate reality from fiction, e.g., Haas’ (2005) analysis of blogs.

Parallel to the rise of the Web 2.0 has been the increasing avail-ability of spatial data and services in cyberspace. Aspects of thisphenomenon have been given a number of labels, the GeoWeb,Neo-Geography (Turner, 2008), Maps 2.0 (Crampton, 2008),volunteered geographic information (Goodchild, 2007). All thesecharacterizations seek to convey the increased ability of ordinaryusers to create maps and share spatial annotations using a numberof formats and indexing systems. For example, Google via its GoogleEarth and Google Maps platforms allows users to create and shareplacemarks (i.e., geographically referenced annotations which can in-clude text and images), routes (e.g., driving directions) and overlays(e.g., delineations of boundaries or showing aerial or other imagery)which has expanded the nature of online information about places(Zook and Graham, 2007). This user generated information rangesfrom the highly parochial (e.g., this is my house) to the helpful (e.g.,this restaurant has great food) to the historical (e.g., this is where jazzbegan) to the political (e.g., this is our land). In short, applications ofWeb 2.0 mapping technologies are as a diverse as the individualswhich create them and the places which they reference.

The ability to simultaneous move through the offline and theonline worlds, e.g., conducting a Google Maps search via a mobiledevice to find a local business or other point of interest, is shapingthe human landscapes we inhabit. Zook and Graham (2007, p.1327) emphasize the role of software (primarily via the highly opa-que algorithms of search engine rankings) in the creation of these

landscapes and note that ‘‘Those off the network are summarilyrelegated to the periphery. . .and even those online are subject tothe caprice of code.” The power of software creates what they termDigiPlace which represents ‘‘. . .the situatedness of individuals bal-anced between the visible and the invisible, the fixed and the fluid,the space of places and the space of flows, and the blurring of thelines between material place and digital representations of place.”(Zook and Graham, 2007, p. 1327). In short, DigiPlace representsthe interface to the blending of the material and the digital.

But how are these representations of place – particularly thoseassociated with Web 2.0 applications – constructed? On whatinformation are they based? While not discounting the role of soft-ware in ordering the presentation of spatial data, i.e., DigiPlace, weseek to understand how connections between place and cyber-space, what we term cyberscape, are continually (re)made. Whyare some people and places well represented while others areperipheralized?

At the most fundamental level offline conditions can shape theability to access cyberspace – the so called digital divide. Physicallack of connection or lack of resources at the individual level canrender this dimension of cyberscape null, i.e., there is no connec-tion and thus, cyberscape collapses. This collapse, however, is onlypartial as a parallel aspect of cyberscape is information aboutplaces contained within cyberspace. While there has long beeninformation about places online (e.g., the Usenet bulletin boardgroups of rec.travel and soc.culture predate the world wide web),the coming of Web 2.0 mapping applications has made the connec-tion between physical places and cyberspace more explicit throughuser created placemarks. Placemarks contain specific coordinatesto a spot on the Earth and some kind of commentary, e.g., text,photos, etc., about that place. Thus, a place without Internet access(the peak of Mt. Everest) can be littered with user created place-marks that help construct its cyberscape. While there are locationson the earth surface without access to or annotation in cyberspace,it is at the opposite end of the spectrum (places with both accessand annotation) that cyberscapes are most ripe for analysis.

Because the use of Web 2.0 mapping is trivially easy – simplyrequiring a user to click on the spot they wish to annotate – thereis often the impression that we are entering an age of cartographicdirect democracy. The straightforwardness of these mapping appli-cations, however, does not mean that their use is even distributedacross space and society (Zook and Graham, 2007; Crampton,2008). Rather, they represent the latest iteration of a socially con-structed cyberspace that continues to reflect the contours and divi-sions of the offline world in which its creators live, in other words,a human cyberscape.

3. Race, landscape and cyberspace

In contrast to the popular memes stressing the liberatory powerof cyberspace in overcoming physical distance and the grassrootsand democratic potential of Web 2.0 applications, more sober anal-yses highlight the continued role of distance and the way in whichindividuals’ identity (e.g., gender, race, etc.) help shape onlineactivities. Many studies (NTIA, 1995, 1998, 1999; Cooper, 2002)have focused on the ‘‘digital divide” and document the relationshipbetween income, age, education and race and the speed at whichnew information technologies are accessed. Despite this workthere remains relatively little written on the specific intersectionof race and the internet. This paper seeks to fill this gap by mergingtheories focused on race, landscapes and cyberspace.

3.1. Race and geography

The interaction between human activities and the physicallandscape (and the resulting patterns and distributions) has long

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been a primary interest of geographers. Part of that past involvedattention to the ways that ‘‘race”, as a condition of the humanexperience, ‘‘played out” in the landscape. Unfortunately, manyof the modern social science disciplines were directly implicatedin the European colonial and imperial experience which marginal-ized and subjugated the non white world. It is out of that experi-ence that the ‘‘biological concept of race,” a hierarchicalcategorization of the human population based on inheritable phys-ical characteristics, originates. In this concept of race, whiteness isnormalized or seen as non-raced, leaving non-whites as raced and‘‘othered.” This asymmetrical, and now discarded (or at least de-bunked) concept of race was long reproduced in research thatuncritically reified racial categories which were in due course ap-plied to space.

The influx of European immigrants to the United States and themigration of Southern African Americans to Northern cities re-sulted in an outpouring of research on how different racial and eth-nic groups congregated and interacted with other groups (Parket al., 1925). If we take these early studies as the origin of modernexaminations of race and space, we can outline how approaches tostudying race and landscape/space have evolved. As economic con-ditions worsened in urban areas in the 1960s, the accompanyingliterature on race focused on the shortcomings of ‘‘underclass”African American society (Clark, 1965). Much of this researchviewed African Americans and African American communities aspathological. It was during this period, inspired by the Civil Rightsmovement, that the discipline of geography belatedly began toseriously write about ‘‘race”. Laura Pulido, for one, correctly cau-tions that the studies of racial groups are not studies of race. Nev-ertheless, she writes, ‘‘The two are clearly distinct, but studies onpeople of color, particularly African Americans, often serve as se-gue to the study of race, and unfortunately sometimes as asubstitute.”(Pulido, 2002, p. 47).

As Dwyer writes, ‘‘In short, the Civil Rights era initiated a con-certed effort by many geographers to draw the discipline’s atten-tion to the manner in which it had neglected the status of ‘‘blackAmericans in geography” (1997, p. 441). The fact that most of therace-related research was about African Americans as opposed toAsians or Latinos, should come as no surprise. In the 1960s and1970s issues pertaining to African Americans, and their relation-ship to whites were so dominant as to be synonymous with ‘‘race”research.

In the 1980s, scholars, including geographers, began to changethe way they conceptualized race, and as a result, how they wroteabout ‘‘minority” groups. Most importantly, following the develop-ment of ‘‘critical race theory”, the concept of race and racial cate-gories were increasingly perceived as social constructions ratherthan essentialized scientific truths (Delgado, 1995). In addition,the advances of the Civil Rights movement translated into gainsfor other ethnic groups. Latino and Native American studies forexample, are just two of the ‘‘ethnic studies” fields that owe at leasta partial debt to Civil Rights movement. These fields, and theirhires, increased the amount of research on racial groups other thanAfrican Americans. The maturation of postcolonial theory in thelate 1970s was also responsible for the broadening of ‘‘raceresearch.”

While the scientific basis for race may have been destabilized,there is near universal agreement that people still identify withraces, are defined by race, and are discriminated against becauseof race. As Kobayashi and Peake suggest, race, ‘‘is one of the mostenduring and fundamental means of organizing society” (2000, p.393). The process by which racial categories are created and nego-tiated and by which ‘‘race” is employed to discriminate and segre-gate, or privilege, is referred to as racialization (see Omi andWinant, 1994). Not to be left out of these intellectual discussionsof race, (and possibly inspired by the discipline’s long silence as a

critical voice on the issue of race), geography has produced a dis-tinct race-related literature making use of the discipline’s uniquetechniques and methodologies and the un-essentialized notionsof ‘‘race”. Most visible are special issues of the Professional Geogra-pher (Schein, 2002) and Social and Cultural Geography (Peak andSchein, 2000) resulting from an NSF and Canadian Embassy spon-sored workshop held at the University of Kentucky in 1998. Inthe intervening years geographers continued to write about racein ways far more contextualized than previous examinations ofvoting patterns and residential segregation.

3.2. Racialized landscape

For example, one of the areas of geography where researchinvolving race has been most productive is the subfield of culturalgeography focused on cultural landscape. Like race, cultural land-scape has long been a concern of geographers. Even more than‘‘race” however, the definition of landscape, and how it is createdand interpreted, are the subject of debate. Following the ‘‘geo-graphic turn”, cultural landscape now shares with ‘‘space” thecharacteristic of no longer being separate from, or a product ofour actions but rather implicated in our everyday lives. Further-more, while not simply our footprint, imprint or reflection, the cul-tural landscape becomes a ‘‘discourse materialized”, ‘‘a materialcomponent of a particular discourse or set of intersecting dis-courses. . .captur[ing]the intent and ideology of the discourse as awhole and is a constitutive part of its ongoing development andreinforcement.” (Schein, 1997, p. 662).

One of the most common and pernicious discourses material-ized is ‘race.’ Through the aforementioned concept of ‘racializa-tion’, tenets of race work their way into the cultural landscape,either materially or symbolically, to produce ‘‘racialized landscape”or cultural landscape as a ‘‘racial project” (Schein, 1999). Theseracialized landscapes then become active agents in racial forma-tions and racist practices, but also provide space for resistance.Key to understanding the relevance of ‘racialized landscape’ is atendency it shares with cultural landscape generally, of obscuringits origins. For example, racialized landscapes can be seen in thegenesis of current neighborhoods, parks, and stadiums that aredependent upon and deeply intertwined with racist practices,including slum clearance, redlining, restrictive covenants and deedrestrictions. While these practices are crucial to the formation ofthese urban landscapes it is equally true that their intent fadesaway overtime, becoming naturalized or taken for granted. Schein(2003, p. 218) refers to this aspect as the ‘‘normative dimension ofthe racialized landscape”.

An expression of race in the cultural landscape of downtownNew Orleans is Louis Armstrong Park in the Tremé neighborhoodoutside of the French Quarter. The park provides an apt illustrationof how racial norms can be concealed in the everyday landscapes,in this case those devoted to recreation or leisure (Crutcher, 2006).At first glance, Armstrong Park appears to be a simple urban parkbuilt around the cultural and entertainment facilities of downtownNew Orleans. Nothing in the built landscape reveals that hundredsof mostly African American families were displaced due to thepark’s construction. Nor is their any indication that the displace-ment of those families is a direct result of the lack of value placedon African American neighborhoods (as compared to business dis-tricts or more affluent residential locations) by planners and the lo-cal government, or that racial discrimination prevented AfricanAmericans from having representation in the local politicalprocess.

It is important to note that the agency and resistance of AfricanAmericans is also visible in the racialized landscape of ArmstrongPark. Following the Civil Rights movement African Americans andtheir allies fought to make their own additions to this normatively

1 Early examples include the use of the Internet by the indigenous Zapatista rebelsin Mexico to gain global support (Froehling, 1997) or the efforts of the unorganizedAmerican militia movement to pursue a racially charged political agenda (Zook, 1996;Castells, 1997).

526 M. Crutcher, M. Zook / Geoforum 40 (2009) 523–534

produced racialized landscape. Inside the park, the performing artstheater is named (renamed) after famous African American gospelsinger Mahalia Jackson, and the Municipal Auditorium now carriesthe name of late African American public servant Morris X. Jeff. Thename of the park itself, is the result of the progressive political atti-tude that followed the election of Moon Landrieu as Mayor of NewOrleans in the early 1970s. Yet this racialized history and land-scape is obscured beneath a veneer of inevitability that the birth-place of jazz should naturally have a park named in honor ofLouis Armstrong.

3.3. Materiality, cyberspace and cyberscape

In contrast to the deep intertwining of human activity andphysical landscapes, cyberspace has often been conceived of asabsolute space, divorced from the materiality of the humans whoinhabited it, e.g., the death of distance thesis (Negroponte, 1995).Moreover, popular rhetoric often characterizes cyberspace asbringing about a ‘‘death of difference” since users can easily createnew identities and communities that readily bridge racial andother differences that plague the offline word (Steiner, 1993).While true to some degree, there is a growing awareness of the ex-tent to which differences in the physical world affect an individ-ual’s actions, experience and interactions in cyberspace (Wynnand Katz, 1997; Alexanian, 2006).

This topic has been of particular interest to scholars focusedon issues of gender who analyze the extent to which the body(and by extension embodied differences) are submerged wheninteraction and conversation is mediated by computer technolo-gies. Contrary to many expectations, these differences appear toretain substantial power even in completely text based environ-ments. For example, Boler (2007, p. 140) argues that ‘‘. . .the actu-alities of the way in which users interpret and derive meaningfrom text based communication often involve reductive bodilymarkers that re-invoke stereotypical notions of racialized, sexual-ized and gendered bodies. Ironically, this new digital Cartesian-ism. . .ultimately results in the innovation of stereotyped bodiesin order to confer authenticity and signification to textual utter-ances.” In other words, people can find the lack of readily visiblephysical markers (such as gender or race) in cyberspace a barrierto communication and paradoxically often recreate a simulacra ofthe body as means to compensate (see also Glaser et al., 2002;Kang, 2000; Kolko et al., 2000; Burkhalter, 1999). Moreover asKwan (2003, p. 373) notes, internet usage need not result inthe contestation of existing gendered/racial norms or stereotypes.Instead, she argues that the use of cyberspace can actually‘‘. . .perpetuate existing gender division of household labor andsustain the gendered construction of ICTs. . .there is evidence thatincreasing use of the internet by women does not significantlychange the patriarchal social relations they face in their everydaylives.”

Therefore, analyses of online interaction need to be conscious ofthe socially constructed differences manifested in the bodies of theusers rather than discount their influences via simplistic expecta-tions that information technologies will automatically subvert dif-ference (Moss and Kwan, 2004). Moreover, it is precisely thedifferences between individuals and cultures that define societyand culture. As Alexanian (2006, p. 140, parenthesis in the original)argues through her analysis of Iranian bloggers, ‘‘culture is not con-tained by a geographic location, but rather is embodied in prac-tices, meaning, and subjectivities. . .individuals’ use of cyberspace,too, is mediated by cultural understandings and related to the con-text (the offline world) in which they have emerged.” In otherwords, cyberspace should be treated in much the same way asany other space of human interaction, i.e., constituted of multiplelayers of history, relationships and geography.

To this end we introduce the concept of cyberscape to empha-size the parallels between cultural landscapes and the dynamicand contingent nature of individuals’ and communities’ use ofthe internet which retains strong ties to the non-digital realm.Madge and O’Connor (2005, p. 83) echo this point by stressingthe simultaneity of the ‘‘virtual” and the ‘‘real” and ‘‘suggest thatboth spaces can be concurrently entwined and experienced for aparticular person in a particular instance.” They further argue forthe need to recognize that cyberspace is ‘‘. . .as heterogeneousand constantly changing as materially grounded geographicalspaces” and the creation of multiple and ‘‘. . .differentiated virtualgeographies interacting with everyday lived practices.” (Madgeand O’Connor, 2005, p. 92). This assertion is echoed by others suchas Boler (2007) who contends that the messiness and complexitiesembodied in physical difference should be extended to any analy-sis of virtual spaces despite the veneer of uniformity that a stan-dardized browser interface offers.

3.4. Racialized cyberscapes

It is thus a reasonable step to extend the lessons of racializedphysical landscapes to an analysis of racialized cyberscapesthrough analysis of how race is overtly and covertly woven intothe content of the internet. Although the environment is digitalrather than physical, this formation of race and racial symbolshas long taken place on the internet.1 Racialized cyberscapes existalong the same two dimensions as cyberscape in general, i.e., theability to access and annotate in cyberspace, and takes form whenrace is an active component in the creation of a digital identity, prac-tice or structure. While the ability to mask one’s identity onlinethrough text based communications such as email or newsgroupsraises the possibility of suppressing (or transcending) race duringonline interaction, we are skeptical of the extent to which this oc-curs. Kang (2000, p. 1153, emphasis in the original) notes theintriguing possibilities of the internet, ‘‘If we communicate throughtyped messages, for instance, we may remain racially anonymous.Or we can present ourselves as having a different race than we doin real space and thereby be racially pseudonymous.” If such a statewere reached, e.g., in the creation of placemarks that were free of ra-cial discourse both in location and content, then one could imaginethe collapse of racialized cyberscape. However, given how deeplyrace is intertwined with the cultural landscape, this seems unlikelyin the extreme. After all, even the silences within maps (Harley,1988, p. 58) such as low numbers of placemarks in African Americanneighborhoods can be read ‘‘as positive statements and not asmerely passive gaps in the flow of language.”

Even Kang’s call for the simpler task of disrupting racial cate-gories (rather than hiding them) in cyberspace is likely easier saidthen done. Echoing the simultaneity thesis proffered by feministscholars, Kolko et al. (2000, pp. 4–5) argue ‘‘neither the invisibil-ity nor the mutability of online identity make it possible for youto escape your ‘‘real world” identity completely. . .all of us whospend time online are already shaped by the ways in which racematters offline, and we can’t help but bring our own knowledge,experiences, and values with us when we log on.” McGerty (2000,pp. 898–9), makes a similar case and stresses the interconnected-ness of online and offline existences that shapes users’ experi-ences and their level of integration or exclusion. Even Kang(2003) acknowledges the pervasive influence of race in cyber-space but hopes it will be focused in social interaction where raceis an integral part of identity rather than online market transac-

2 While other online mapping services are available (e.g. NASA’s WorldWind orMicrosoft’s Live Search), Google’s platforms have been widely adopted by usersparticularly at the time that Katrina hit New Orleans.

M. Crutcher, M. Zook / Geoforum 40 (2009) 523–534 527

tions where racial bias can create monetary impacts. These issuesbecome even more germane given the shift to more image (e.g.,Facebook or MySpace) or video (e.g., YouTube) based interactionwhich supplement the once exclusive text nature of internetinteraction that these authors were addressing. In the presentenvironment it is becoming ever easier for the racial (or gender)aspects of a person’s identity to be readily available to othersonline.

Even more fundamental (and the main focus of this paper) isthe extent to which race influences the ability to access andannotate cyberscape. Many studies have documented (NTIA,1995, 1998, 1999; Cooper, 2002) a digital divide and the relation-ship between income and race with poorer and African Americanpopulations enjoying less access to and making less use of theinternet. In many ways this current divide echoes historical tech-nological changes (such as factory automation that appearedshortly after African Americans migrated to northern industrialcities) that have complicated efforts of this community to im-prove their economic fortunes (Chapman, 1996). The digital di-vide challenges the simplistic assumption that the adoption ofinformation technology will provide similar benefits to all. Evenif more people are becoming ‘‘connected”, digital technologiesare ‘‘. . .dynamic phenomen[a] whose social and spatial bound-aries are constantly changing in response to the latest ICT innova-tions and demands of high-end users.” (Chakraborty and Bosman,2005, pp. 407–408).

Thus, differences in access and use of new technologies haveimportant implications for how any community will prosper inthe future. As Castells (2001, p. 269) notes ‘‘The fundamental dig-ital divide is not measured by the number of connections to theinternet, but by the consequences of both connection and lackof connection. . .the internet. . .is not just a technology. It is thetechnological tool and organizational form that distributes infor-mation power, knowledge generation, and networking capacityin all realms of activity.” While it is tempting to view the digitaldivide as something that will eventually be overcome (e.g., every-one will have a ‘‘computer”) new digital divides are in a constantprocess of formation (Hargittai, 2002). Crampton (2004, p. 20) ar-gues for the metaphor of a digital lag rather than divide as ithighlights the ongoing nature of this process. ‘‘We should ratherthink about successive rounds of inequality like waves on thebeach; by the time one wave races up the shore. . .soaking intothe sand, the next wave has always already begun...but it lagsbehind.”

More importantly the digital lag, is fundamental to our ability toparticipate in and control the technologies that define our everyday lives and spaces. In the case of Web 2.0 mapping technologies,the ability for individuals and communities to access and annotatecyberscapes is particularly important given the new powers thatthese same online mapping technologies offer to larger institutions(be they governments or corporations). Graham (2005, p. 563)notes the way in which ‘‘software code actively shapes and struc-tures social and geographical inequalities within and betweenplaces” by prioritizing government service provision as well as cat-egorizing neighborhoods and populations into levels of ‘‘desirabil-ity” with associated levels of access or restrictions. Indeed researchis already underway on software algorithms that leverage usergenerated spatial annotations to automatically identify and classifyplaces based on their cyberscapes (Mummidi and Krumm, 2008).Places and peoples who do not participate in the creation of cyber-scapes will find themselves on the receiving end of the automaticproduction of space (Thrift and French, 2002) with little recourseto write their existence into the cyberscapes of the 21st century.The case study of Google Earth in the post-Katrina context illus-trates the creation of cyberscape and highlights the extent towhich it is racialized.

4. Cyberscapes of post-katrina new orleans

On the eve of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans exhibited off-line social and economic conditions on par with many largercities in the United States. Socially the city was noticeablyracially segregated with African Americans constituting a major-ity of the city’s population. Public education in New Orleansmirrored the city’s racial residential segregation with low in-come African Americans comprising an overwhelming majorityof public primary and secondary students. White students at-tended private, typically catholic, schools. New Orleans’ internalpopulation distribution had African Americans generally concen-trated in what Lewis (2003) calls the city’s backswamp ghettos,meaning those low-lying neighborhoods located away from theMississippi River’s natural levy, and ‘‘New Orleans East” asprawling postwar suburb located across the Industrial Canal.Conversely, whites were more concentrated in historicneighborhoods along the Mississippi River, the ‘‘EsplanadeRidge”, ‘‘Lakeview”, ‘‘Lakefront”, ‘‘Broadmoor” and ‘‘Mid-City”neighborhoods (see Fig. 1A).

It is striking that these offline patterns of segregation appear tocorrelate with the distribution of Google Earth Community gener-ated placemarks within Google Earth (See Fig. 1B). While there area considerable number of placemarks within White and more welloff neighborhoods such as the Garden District of French Quarterthere are virtually none within the historically low income, long-time African American neighborhood of the lower Ninth ward.The analysis of this general pattern, and the more specific patternsthat emerged in the immediate post-Katrina context, can provideevidence of racialized cyberscapes and insight on how they areformed.

4.1. A watershed event for Google

The timing of Google’s entrée into the realm of spatial informa-tion coincided closely with Hurricane Katrina. In early 2005 thecompany released Google Maps, an online mapping and spatialsearch engine, and Google Earth, a ‘‘virtual globe” that allows usersto view aerial imagery of locations around the world. AlthoughGoogle Earth and Google Maps share access to Google’s indexand provide identical search results for spatially reference queries(e.g., Thai restaurants in San Francisco), there are a few key differ-ences.2 Google Maps is a web based mapping service that also pro-vides the means (via its application programming interface or API)of creating maps for use in other websites, i.e., a map mashup. Incontrast, Google Earth is stand alone software program that providesseamless satellite and aerial imagery of the Earth creating a virtualglobe upon which users can add and share placemarks and overlayswith other users. A user of Google Earth is able to turn various layersof information (roads, place names, etc.) on and off. Both platformshave been updated since 2005 with new features continuouslyadded.

At the time of Hurricane Katrina users could only create place-marks in Google Earth or via Google Maps API mashups such asthe Scipionus website discussed later in this article. More impor-tantly, the means for widely sharing one’s placemarks during Sep-tember 2005 was by posting them at the Google EarthCommunity, an online bulletin board (located at http://bbs.key-hole.com) for users of Google Earth. A series of discussion forumson a range of topics provided the opportunity to share user gener-ated placemarks which would eventually become incorporated

Fig. 1A. Distribution of African American population in New Orleans, 2000. Note: Census tracts with a higher percentage of African Americans show up on the map as darker.Source: Census Base Map from Socialexplorer.com; neighborhood labels from authors.

Fig. 1B. Distribution of Google Earth community generated placemarks, New Orleans. Source: Author’s screenshot of Google Earth from May 11, 2007.

4 The analysis presented in this section is based upon a complete review ofHurricane Katrina/New Orleans related discussion threads and postings within the

528 M. Crutcher, M. Zook / Geoforum 40 (2009) 523–534

into the Google Earth Community layer that any user of GoogleEarth could access.3

In many ways Hurricane Katrina represented a unintended fieldtest for Google’s mapping services as the flooding in New Orleanscaptured world wide attention and was clearly very spatially rele-vant, i.e., where are the waterlines in New Orleans? Central to thismoment was the active online Google Earth Community thatconsisting of hobbyists sharing tips, comparing explorations in the

3 While this open mechanism worked reasonably well while the number ofplacemarks within Google Earth was small, the growing number of postings has sincethen led to an editing process in which some are incorporated into a layer withinGoogle Earth (renamed the Geographic Web) and others are not. Countering thistrend is Google’s introduction of My Maps in 2006, which makes it much easier forindividuals to add placemarks which are indexed and searchable via Google Maps.The My Maps option, however, was not available in September 2005.

virtual globe and distributing user created spatial notations (place-marks). Long before Hurricane Katrina came ashore just east ofNew Orleans, members the Google Earth Community were busyoverlaying real-time storm images atop the aerial imagery of theGulf of Mexico and the Southeast United States within Google Earth.4

Google Earth Community bulletin board (http://bbs.keyhole.com). Using the publi-cally available search functions we conducted approximately 10 relevant keywordsearches, such as ‘‘New Orleans” or ‘‘Hurricane Katrina”, throughout all forums andreviewed the approximately 500–700 resulting discussion threads. The Google EarthCommunity bulletin board archives and timestamps postings, discussions andplacemarks making it possible to reconstruct the sequence of posting surroundingthis event. The review was conducted during August 2007 and the examplespresented here were selected because they represent common types of postings andmaterials.

Fig. 2. Overlay of flood imagery in Google Earth. Source: KMZ file containing flood imagery originally uploaded on August 31, 2005; Author’s screenshot of Google Earth fromMay 11, 2007.

M. Crutcher, M. Zook / Geoforum 40 (2009) 523–534 529

This method of overlay became one of the more common uses of Goo-gle Earth in the early days of the crisis. Often users had no specific con-nection with the places being represented but were either interestedin tracking an ongoing event or in demonstrating their facility withthe technology to their peers, e.g., zip code maps of potential insuranceliabilities. In short, the activities on the Google Earth Community bul-letin board prior to Hurricane Katrina passing over New Orleans weremore of a technical exercise to track a live event rather than a manifes-tation of cyberscape.

On August 29th, the day before landfall, New Orleans’ Mayor C.Ray Nagin issued the city’s first ever mandatory evacuation. Thirtythousand of those who could not or chose not to leave the cityflocked to the Superdome, which had food and water to last36 h. In the days following the storm, structural damage to theSuperdome, and city utilities led to the deteriorating conditionswidely reported by the media. Black faces were broadcast worldwide as those suffering in shelters and looting New Orleans busi-ness. Hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents found them-selves unable to return home for the weeks for the storm. Manyhave not returned by 2008.5 Although images of destruction werenear ubiquitous in early September, place specific information wasnot available. While existing web technologies such as forums, chatrooms and web pages did provide some avenues for information ex-change, disembedded images and rumors were everywhere. For allbut the most astute readers of New Orleans landscape, (those ableto discern rooftop architecture, changing neighborhood land uses,interstate highway routes and interchanges) the flood of birds-eyeNew Orleans images was disorienting. This situation was particu-larly well suited for Google Earth which made it extremely easyfor individuals to make and distribute place specific commentsand in so doing creating a cyberscape of post-Katrina New Orleans.Users of the Google Earth Community bulletin board posted over-

5 It is estimated that between 645,000 and 1.1 million people were displaced fromLouisiana by Katrina. One year later, 37% of the city’s pre-storm population (460,000)had returned. Evacuees found themselves located in up to 700 communities acrossthe United States with the largest concentration along the Gulf Coast throughout theSouth. African Americans were overrepresented in the population of evacuees. By thesummer of 2008, 72% of New Orleans pre storm population had returned to the city(GNOCDC, 2008).

lays of flooded areas of New Orleans provided by the news mediaover, or adjacent to, pre-flood images of those areas (see Figs. 2and 3). These postings were potentially valuable as referenceimages for a host of flood images that lacked geographic specificity.The shortcoming of this method was that it was limited by theavailability of photos.

In reaction to this limitation a number of grassroots organiza-tions and activists (including those within the Google Earth Com-munity) organized online to gather new imagery from theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) andplace it into the Google Earth interface to allow people to view re-cent pictures of flooding (Cramer, 2005; Ewalt, 2005). As a resultthe distribution of high quality aerial imagery to the public wasgreatly speeded up; it was a week after the 9/11 event beforeimages of the World Trade Tower site were made public butpost-Katrina flooding images were available within 24 h (Hafner,2005). While the manipulation left much to be desired from a tech-nical standpoint (images were not geo-referenced by coordinatesbut placed by hand) they fulfilled an overwhelming desire to getinformation about conditions on the ground. Moreover, those in-volved with this effort were particularly interested in making surethat this information was easy to access quickly. As Kathlyn Cra-mer, an important figure in these efforts, notes, ‘‘I wanted to comeup with a process for your average frightened person, who can getat the internet, but is not able to learn new software,” (quoted inEwalt, 2005).

While Google Earth and the efforts of the Google Earth Commu-nity did provide a wealth of freely available online informationabout New Orleans, the cyberscape associated with this effort alsoreflected the long standing offline spatial divisions (racial andotherwise) within New Orleans. In his book about the centuriesold fight to carve out a place for New Orleans in an inhospitablenatural landscape, Colten (2005) prophetically pointed to theongoing flooding challenges faced by the Broadmoor and the LowerNinth Ward neighborhoods. He points out that Broadmoor, a mixedincome, and mixed race neighborhood at the ‘‘bottom of the bowl”with significant political capital and pricey real estate, was subjectto the same flooding as the African American neighborhood of theNinth Ward. Accordingly, Hurricane Katrina did not discriminate.Levee breaches throughout the city devastated both predominately

Fig. 3. Image of flooding. KMZ file containing flood imagery originally uploaded on September 2, 2005. Source: Author’s screenshot of Google Earth from May 9, 2007.

530 M. Crutcher, M. Zook / Geoforum 40 (2009) 523–534

African American and white areas. But despite the non-discrimi-nate distribution of waterlines, the resulting cyberscape thatformed during this devastation and its aftermath was remarkablyuneven and more importantly exhibited apparent racial shadings.6

4.2. Measuring cyberscapes

In addition to the activities at the Google Earth Communitybulletin board, map mashups based on Google Maps’ API ap-peared after Hurricane Katrina that facilitated spatial annotationon the extent and location of storm damage at specific locationsin New Orleans. These mashups represent one of the most pow-erful means by which individuals can participate in the construc-tion of cyberscape via the submission of data, photos and text.For example, the creation of the website Scipionus.com providedthe means of making place specific comments such as ‘‘5 inchesof flooding recorded here” or ‘‘Flooding to 2nd story on Tues”that were made available to subsequent visitors. Although thiswas not a Google sponsored service, instead the creation oftwo software programmers acting independently (Singel, 2005),it received considerable media attention and attracted hundredsof thousands of visitors within the first few days of its existence(Ewalt, 2005). The usefulness of the site was that it allowed peo-ple to view specific locations within the gulf region, e.g., theirhome, and see what kind of conditions had been reported near-by. These reports, however, were not official but volunteeredinformation left by other internet users with local information,i.e., a user generated cyberscape.

The visualization of the distribution of these notations (seeFig. 4) provides a useful insight to the types of places that receivedattention from people using Scipionus. While both the Lakeview

6 For example, one incident on which the authors specifically searched forcommentary within the Google Earth Community was the closing of the CrescentCity Connection Bridge to Gretna by largely white Gretna police officers when a groupof predominantly African American people attempted to cross. This racially chargedevent was the subject of only one placemark (created seven months after Katrina inApril 2006) in which the poster commented that it was ‘‘the most shameful episode ofthe whole affair.” The only reaction to this posting came six months later fromanother user who simply said ‘‘Don’t be too quick to judge the Gretna officials.Especially if you were not there. And don’t believe everything you hear from themedia.”

and Lower Ninth Ward neighborhoods were inundated by leveebreaches, the more affluent and whiter Lakewood area has consid-erably more placemarks than the poorer and largely African Amer-ican Lower Ninth Ward. Therefore, it is useful to analyze thecharacteristics of the locations of comments to see what kind ofplaces had an active cyberscape in post-Katrina New Orleans.While this is far from fool-proof, i.e., there was nothing to preventsomeone from placing a comment at a point about which theyknew nothing, the large numbers of visitors strongly suggests thatthe information was of real value. Moreover, the creators of the sitedid exert some control by removing comments that were obviouslyerroneous (Singel, 2005).

4.3. Analyzing user generated Scipionus data

In order to understand the characteristics of the places associ-ated with post-Katrina cyberscapes, we turn to statistical analysis.The goal of this method is not to explain all the variability sur-rounding the placemarks as this would require data about theindividual creating the placemark and such data are simply notavailable. Instead the goal is to analyze the demographics of theplaces about which placemarks were made; in other words, weare exploring nature of the places (via standard census designa-tions) that are being annotated rather that the factors behindthe placement decision itself. In undertaking such an analysiswe wish to see whether the theoretical discussion of racializedcyberscape can be observed in a statistically rigorous manner.

The creators of the Scipionus.com website generously providedaccess to the full database of user generated comments. There werea total of 1744 comments (or placemarks) for the entire gulf coastwith 77% located within Louisiana, 17% in Mississippi and theremaining 6% scattered in other states. Almost all (97%) of Louisi-ana’s placemarks were located within the New Orleans metropoli-tan statistical area (MSA), with 74% within the city boundaries ofNew Orleans itself. Each Scipionus observation included latitudeand longitude coordinates, a time/date stamp and the text of thecomment. Unfortunately no data on the individual who placedthe comment was collected by the website.

The analysis was limited to placemarks within the Jefferson,Orleans and St. Bernard parishes because they were the areashardest hit by levee breaks and flooding. While arguments could

Fig. 4. Scipionus.com Map (generated via Google Maps’ API) for New Orleans Flooding Reports. Author’s screenshot of Scipionus website from May 11, 2007.

M. Crutcher, M. Zook / Geoforum 40 (2009) 523–534 531

be made for a more inclusive or restrictive set of observations foranalysis, we were primarily concerned with capturing the areas inwhich people were displaced by flooding than with adhering to astrict politically defined region. Moreover, when the analysis waslimited to the city of New Orleans (defined as Orleans parish) themodels produced very similar results.

A key assumption for any statistical analysis is that eachobservation is independent from other observations and this ap-plies spatially as well. For example, an individual’s commutingdecisions are related to her neighbors as they all have similar ac-cess to the same road or transit infrastructure and therefore anyanalysis of a physical phenomenon needs to adjust for spatialautocorrelation. However, the independent variable under analy-sis here is fundamentally different than other urban or neighbor-hood phenomenon. While there is a clear spatial component toScipionus placemarks, i.e., the spot upon which it is placed, theaction of placing it reflects a technological choice akin to decidingto get one’s news from the radio rather than the television. Asthis choice is about a selection of technology rather than one tiedto spatial constraints it does not face the same theoretical andmethodological problems that a more traditional spatial analysiswould.

In other words, the Scipionus placemarks represent a choice oftechnology to provide information about places; rather than an ef-fect of the availability of a technology in place – these placemarkswere not being posted directly from the places to which they refer.After all, New Orleans in the immediate post-Katrina aftermathwas in a mandatory evacuation and most of those who were notable to get out were forced to go to the Superdome or ConventionCenter as the city was without power. In short, the act of creating aScipionus placemark was largely disconnected from the physicallocation (a common characteristic of Internet related activity) itwas describing.

In addition to this theoretical justification based on deductivelogic, i.e., no power and no connectivity would make placemarkcreation in situa impossible, there is considerable evidence from

the placemarks themselves that the person posting was not inthe area being described. First of all, approximately 25% of theplacemarks were requests for information, e.g., ‘‘anyone knowwhat happened at country day school?” or ‘‘PLEASE help locatethe Pallin Family”. In addition, another 35% of the placemarks pro-vide indications that the poster was relaying second-hand informa-tion or reporting away from the location. For example, ‘‘Corner of1077 and Brewster. Had contact with parents. Lots fo [sic] treesdown, but no water damage.” and ‘‘Resident of Norland was in con-tact with neighbors who said there was no flooding in houses inthat area”.

Therefore, given the non-spatially dependent nature of Scipi-onus placemark creation, the assumption of independence be-tween observations in the dependent variable is extremelyrobust. These placemarks may indeed be clustered but this cluster-ing is not a function of the locale. Again, Scipionus placemarks rep-resent a technologically derived decision rather than a spatiallydetermined decision. Thus, standard measures of spatial autocorre-lation (such as Moran’s I) or corrective measures (such as spatialregression) are largely irrelevant to our analysis. We are not con-cerned per se whether this phenomenon is spatially clustered orhow we might correct for this. Instead, our goal is understandingthe characteristics/demographics of the places about which theindependent choice to use a specific technology to request or dis-tribute information were made.

4.4. Building the models, interpreting the results

The Scipionus database was converted into a database (.dbf) fileand imported into the GIS program ArcView 3.1 for analysis. Basedon the latitude and longitude, each placemark was overlayed uponUS Census coverages and associated with a specific block, blockgroup and tract. This data was exported as a database (.dbf) fileinto Microsoft Access where three separate files based on the USCensus defined areal units were created. The number of place-marks in each areal unit (block, block group or tract) was counted

Table 1Model results.

Dependent variables Model 1 Mode 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5

Stad. b t Stad. b t Stad. b t Stad. b t Stad. b t

% of population who are African American (0.49) (9.92) (0.46) (9.93) (0.32) (5.53) (0.34) (5.82) (0.29) 4.72Population, 2000 figures 0.28 591 0.24 5.17 0.26 5.56 0.31 5.97Median household income 0.23 3.84 0.31 4.52 036 5 01% of population who rent 0.14 2.34 0.21 3.04% of population older than 65 012 2.14Adjusted R2 0.233 0.307 0.336 0.345 0.353g 320 320 320 320 320F 96.45 71 96 54.97 43.18 35.36

8 We do not wish to suggest, however, that poorer and African Americanpopulations were not gathering place specific information during this time. Indeed,these populations drew upon any number of social networks (family, friends, etc.) andtechnologies (television, telephones and Internet bulletin boards) to share and gatherinformation during the post-Katrina period (see Airriess et al., 2008 for an example ofhow another ethnic community leveraged social networks in post-Katrina NewOrleans). Moreover, the analysis of Scipionus data does not reveal the extent to whichAfrican Americans may have used Google Earth for up-to-date graphic evidence oftheir neighborhoods; in a sense a much more simple task (and more revealing ofactual usage) than placing placemarks and entering into online bulletin boarddiscussions. Although this is beyond the scope of this paper, the authors did takeinitial steps towards answering this question by performing a snowball sample of

532 M. Crutcher, M. Zook / Geoforum 40 (2009) 523–534

and served as the dependent variable for an analysis conducted inSPSS.7 Because of the theoretical concerns of the paper, i.e., the exis-tence of racialized cyberscapes, the racial makeup of a place isclearly a key variable. In the context of New Orleans the sharpest ra-cial divide is between whites and blacks and therefore the percent-age of population who are African American was the first variableintroduced. Given that the dependent variable measures a level ofactivity it is also necessary to control for the overall size of the pop-ulation as more people represent more potential placemark creators.The remaining independent variables, median house income, per-centage of population who rent and percentage of population olderthan 65 are all based on the findings of a number of studies whichcontribute to the use of the Internet in general (NTIA, 1995, 1998,1999; Cooper, 2002).

Table 1 shows the development of a series of models (at theareal unit of census tracts) in which the five independent variablesare added one at a time beginning with percentage of AfricanAmerican population. It is particularly important for the goal ofthis analysis that this variable is statistically significant and nega-tive across all models. When it was the only independent variable(see Model 1) it accounted for close to 25% of the variation in thenumber of placemarks in a census track. The inclusion of the otherindependent variables that theoretically could be thought to influ-ence this number, i.e., income levels, number of people living in acensus tract, percentage of population who rented or were over 65,the percentage of African American variable remained remarkablyconsistent.

In short, this analysis demonstrates a clear relationship be-tween the racial makeup of an area and its post-Katrina cyberscapeof Google Earth placemarks. Neighborhoods with high percentagesof African Americans were significantly less likely to have informa-tional comments about them posted at the Scipionus website. Thisstatistically significant relationship was also found at smaller arealunits, i.e., the census block group and census block level, with vari-ables exhibiting the same positive or negative relationship withthe dependent variable. In other words the percentage of popula-tion that was African American was negatively and significantlycorrelated with the number of placemarks within a census blockgroup or block. The explanatory power of the variation was consid-erably less, (e.g., an adjusted r-squared of 0.17 for block groups)likely because of the large number of areal units with no observa-tions from the Scipionus data. These results capture the fundamen-tal role of scale in any geographical analysis (albeit at relativelyclosely related micro-levels) in describing and analyzing accessto the Internet. As a major metropolitan area in the United States,New Orleans is well connected to cyberspace but as one shifts thespatial and social scale of analysis the divides or lags within cyber-scapes become clear (see also Crampton, 2004, pp. 141–170).

7 Standard descriptive statistics are Min = 0; Max = 20; Mean = 3.15; StandardDeviation = 3.24.

This is not to imply the Scipionus was deliberately biasing thedata it received. Rather, this demonstrates that the posters of infor-mation about local conditions at Scipionus were much more likelyto be knowledgeable about or interested in richer and whiterneighborhoods.8 In short, rather than constituting an undifferenti-ated arena divorced from materiality, the cyberscape of post-KatrinaNew Orleans replicated the divisions (including race) separatingpeople and places in the offline world. As this marks an early andkey moment in the development of a racialized cyberscape it wasour intention to clearly document this in order to prevent this frombecoming naturalized or taken for granted.

5. Cyberscapes for all the people

Shame on our representatives. Shame on our officials.Shame on all of them.They say they only want good people back.All people are good people.Listen to the drums.Listen to the drumsI am not afraid.

-Big Chief Victor Harris

Increasing digital spaces are intimately intertwined with offlineplaces and peoples, making the creation, consumption and contesta-tion of online experience key sites for the use and creation of humansociety. These resulting cyberscapes are ‘‘discourses materialized”albeit in virtual form. Google-enabled mapping, via its own inter-faces or websites like Scipionus, shows the creativity and power ofwidening society’s ability to map and share spatial phenomenonvia electronic networks. The potential represented by this processis tremendous and in many ways liberatory. This promise, however,is tempered by the fact that alongside the means to empower, Web2.0 mapping technologies also provide the mechanism by which di-vides can be (re)created, including along the distressingly familiarcontours of race. The resulting cyberscapes are colored by the funda-

New Orleans residents across races and income levels during the summer of 2007.The results of the questioning revealed that people who were not frequent internetusers before the storm did not use Google Earth or related technologies forinformation. These were primarily working class and poor African Americans,especially the middle aged and elderly.

M. Crutcher, M. Zook / Geoforum 40 (2009) 523–534 533

mental divides pre-existing in society and in some cases can amplifythem. As Victor Harris laments, the human landscape of the post-Katrina era in New Orleans may only include the ‘‘good people”rather than all the people and we extend his concern to the phenom-enon of cyberscapes as well.

More than anything, the racialized cyberscapes that emerged inNew Orleans illustrates that the digital divide, remains a relevant al-beit evolving concern despite the increased use of the Internet bybroad segments of the population. Indeed, rather than a divide whichpresupposes a static situation in which a gap can be bridged, we pre-fer Crampton’s (2004) characterization of a digital lag. In otherwords, a dynamic and constantly shifting gap in the use of digital re-sources caused by structural issues that can not be successfullybridged by technology alone. Thus, the introduction of Google Mapsand other online Web 2.0 technologies is creating a new divide; onenot based on simplistic notions of access but on the ability to usetechnology in ways that are meaningful to everyday life.

Other research also highlights the need to move past the ‘‘digi-tal divide” per se and focus on how the use of information technol-ogies varies across gender, race and class. While early adopters ofnew technologies typically are made up of the most astute andskilled users who require little in terms of support, it is clear thatlagging populations require significantly different tactics to allowthem to engage with and successfully use a technology. For exam-ple, Gilbert et al.’s (2008) study of poor women’s use of informa-tion technologies for health related issues highlight a number ofstrategies (e.g., sharing computers via their place based social net-works) that were key for this population. In the emerging world ofWeb 2.0, access to technology is not enough, rather one must en-gage with ‘‘technologies that permit one to be in the world, andto encounter it in a rich and meaningful way.” (Crampton, 2004,pp. 164–166). Participating in the creation of cyberscape repre-sents exactly this kind of engagement.

Moreover, the active participation in creating localized spatialinformation (via Google or other technologies) holds tremendouspotential for determining what is known about places. As Goodchild(2007, p. 220) argues, the most important promise of Web 2.0 map-ping lies ‘‘. . .in what it can tell about local activities in various geo-graphic locations that go unnoticed by the world’s media, and aboutlife at a local level.” But when certain groups of people do not or can-not participate (as in the case with the African American communitywithin post-Katrina New Orleans), then the resulting cyberscapeshide as much as they reveal. In the case of New Orleans we fear thatthe practical outcome of cyberscape (much as the waterlines of2005) extends far beyond the lack of real-time knowledge or the dis-tribution of placemarks. The post-Katrina landscape of New Orleansis awash with efforts to create new physical spaces, whether they beneighborhood revitalization planning based on questions of sus-tainable communities, or current efforts to tear down the city’sremaining public housing infrastructure. The cyberscapes of citycontribute to the context in which this rebuilding takes place. With-out the active participation of displaced African Americans, thesecommunities run the risk of finding themselves on the receivingends of a very distinct racialized cyberscape. As Victor Harris sings,‘‘All people are good people” and deserve a voice in cyberscapes de-spite the digital lag they face.

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