赛博空间地理分布研究

Research on Geographic Distribution of Cyberspace

如何界定虚拟的赛博空间与地理实际(如人均国内生产总值和人口)之间的关系,是一个备受关注的问题。文章首先运用Lorenz曲线和吉尼系数研究了中国互联网地区域名的时空分布,然后运用指数定律对中国互联网地区域名数量、地区人均国内生产总值和地区人口数量进行了分析,得出的结论是:赛博空间分布是地区人均国内生产总值的反映,与地区人口分布联系不大。这证实了赛博空间与经济活动的紧密相关性。研究中还发现,赛博空间仍然处于高速增长期;最后给出了中国互联网增长的速度,以及到达成熟稳定时期所需的时间。

As the development of cyberspace represents the cutting edge of the new global economy, its size and content are likely to reflect the distribution of GDP per capita and population of the real world. In this paper, we firstly discuss the spatial-temporal distribution of Internet in China with the methods of Lorenz Curve and Gini Coefficient. Then we use the power law to analyze the domain distribution in each province, the distribution of GDP per capita and the population in each province. It was found that cyberspace is still at its high speed, and the cyberspace distribution reflects the distribution of regional GDP per capita, not the regional population. The correlations that we found between regional domain distribution and population was low, although that between the regional domain distribution and regional GDP per capita was much higher, confirming our general intuition that the economic development of region is all the more important in explaining cyberspace size. The power law relations that we have examined all display the tendency for the number of small events —regional domain distribution, regional population, and regional GDP per capita —to be less than what power law predicts, this can easily be explained by the smaller domains having not yet reached maturity. We illustrate the plausibility hypothesis that the largest domains approximate power law while the smaller domains are growing towards this steady state. The differences in power law that we computed between these two sets confirms this notion. Finally, the paper gives the developing speed and the years to reach the mature and steady state of Internet in China.