Shortly before dawn breaks over Manhat-tan's lower East Side, a pajama-clad securities investor rolls out of bed to punch an order into his personal computer transferring a stock certificate for 100 shares of Microsoft to a broker living on a yacht in the American Virgin Islands.

Moments later, the certificate is electronically converted into a Eurobond and snatched up by another broker in Los Angeles, who in turn sells it as deutsch marks to a foreign-currency speculator in Tokyo. Again reconfigured, this time into a Japanese treasury note, the chameleon-like scrap of digitized currency makes its way along undersea cords of fiber-optic cable to Singapore where a corporate manager picks it up for his portfolio as a hedge against looming inflation.

Following the sun westward to such "wired" destinations as Bahrain, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, perhaps even back to that original broker in New York City—all within minutes and not too many more computer keystrokes—the medium of commercial exchange we traditionally know as money changes hands and national identity with dizzying speed and profound implications.

This is the modern reality of world finance, where the digitization of money allows what FSU geographer Barney Warf calls "gargantuan amounts" of deregulated assets to move around the planet at the speed of light. And with almost no governmental oversight or individual accountability, either.

Ultimately, say Warf and others tracking the phenomenal growth of the globe-shrinking Internet, not yet a dozen years old, this is how most of the world's financial capital will change hands. And where most of its rush of new players may strike it rich.

All the supertankers, pipelines, trucks and barges combined won't be able to match the Internet's capacity for commercial exchange, Warf predicts. All the heavy lifting and costly infrastructure of a 200-year-old, manufacturing-based economy are giving way to a service-generated, telecommunications-enabled "time-space compression", as Warf calls it, that will not only globalize capitalism as an economic system but already is fundamentally reconstituting the very structure of social relations and the rhythms of everyday life.

Throughout North Ameri-ca's aptly named Rust Belt, the one-time blue chip manufacturing and shipping centers have lost much of their job-producing clout. Factories close or move out of the country. Labels that once boasted "Made in the U.S.A." now read China, Peru, the Dominican Republic.

Almost all of today's new jobs in this country are being created in some area of services, and the high-paying jobs show up in the producer or advanced services such as marketing, engineering, advertising, legal services, accounting and, of course, finance. Making them all possible, Warf says, is the web of global telecommunications, including the Internet.

Which is not necessarily cause for universal rejoicing, he adds. Contrary to the utopian predictions of futurists such as Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler, cyberspace's instantaneous linkage of computers everywhere may not be the high road to McLuhan's "global village," Toffler's "third wave of inexhaustible information" or even Microsoft chairman Bill Gates' "seamless, universal connectivity," says Warf.

Labels that once boasted "Made in the U.S.A." now read China. Peru, the Dominican Republic.

Instead of what some are calling "the end of geography" and a new millennium of equal access to the Internet high-way's promised pot of gold, Warf says, the phenomenon is proving to be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it's rapidly creating a global elite of mostly white, male professionals clustered into a limited number of highly competitive, super-cities wired together with little or no regard to national boundaries, languages or interests. On the other, it's creating new subclasses of the disenfranchised or the working poor, and not just in the Third World.

Tokyo, London and New York City represent what Warf calls cyberspace's "centralizing aspect" in which high-value-added and high-wage activities—irregular, unstan-dardized, context-dependent, decision-making transactions that can't be done effectively through telecommunications—are handled by an elite few in traditional, usually face-to-face settings.

The flipside of global cities are the myriad data-entry chores handling payroll, medical records, insurance forms, magazine subscriptions and so forth that can be farmed out to just about anyone with a computer and basic typing skills, anywhere in the connected world, the cheaper the better.

These are the low-wage, low-value-added, sweatshop-level, boring jobs that Warf calls the Internet's "decentralizing aspect," grunt work routinely performed by legions of women in back offices from Ireland to India, China to the Philippines, as well as in dozens of so-called "offshore banking centers" stretching from the tiny Cayman Islands of the Caribbean to even tinier Vanuatu in the far South Pacific.

Revolutionary? In many ways, yes, says Warf, the head of FSU's geography department. But even more to the point for a geographer whose prime interest is political economy, digital telecommunications is literally restructuring society in both good and bad ways far more radically than any of its predecessor communications technologies ever came close to accomplishing.

Already, an estimated 300 million people worldwide are plugged into the World Wide Web's information superhighway. Roughly 100 million of them live in the United States. Ironically though, Scandi-navia, Canada and Australia outrank the U.S. in proportionate numbers of Web users. That is, in a comparison of Internet hosts per 1,000 individuals, the U.S. comes out relatively low because so large a percentage of the American population has no access at all.

"Eighty percent of all international traffic on the Internet is either to or from the U.S.," Warf says. "But, even here, there are a lot of people being left out in off-line communities."

The idea that anyone can tap in and get online is one of the Internet's great myths, Warf has found. Instead, he says, there is a digital divide between those with access and those without. Overwhelmingly, users are white, male, college-educated professionals.

In Europe, the greatest connectivity is in the wealthier nations, such as Sweden, Finland, England and Germany. In East Asia, it's Japan. Otherwise, the vast bulk of the world's people--97 percent--remain unplugged. Some of the world's largest cities—Shanghai, Seoul, Calcutta, Mexico City—might be considered cyberspace outcasts at best.

As co-editor of Cities in the Telecommunications Age: The Fracturing of Geographies, (Routledge, 2000) Warf argues that the Internet is more likely to reinforce or even deepen existing divisions between the haves and have-nots of the world. Just as in the so-called democracy of classical Athens, where "the relatively small, educated, and affluent elite in a few countries and cities" had access to knowledge, in the Age of the Internet "the uneducated, switched-off masses" stand to be denied the tools to build better lives.

"The bottom line is that telecommunications reproduces rather than eradicates spatial differences," Warf says. "Whether the routine, mundane, data-entry jobs go to Oklahoma or Jamaica doesn't really matter because the things that make big bucks are things that can't be done over the phone or in video-conferences. They require face-to-face meetings, and that's where the 'end of geography' argument fails.

"Instead of eliminating differences between places, they allow their differences to be exploited. Just as in the past, the rich will get richer, and the poor often will be left out. Even the most wired of cities will still have their ghettoes."

The patterns of wealth and power may not be as stable and predictable during the telecommunications age as they were in the past, Warf says. Instead, they are rapidly becoming far more complicated and fluid, with shifting mosaics and kaleidoscopes of unevenness.

But they continue to exist, despite their new dimensions. And geography—the study of how we shape our world—has not been annihilated, only reshaped itself with new meaning in a world where continents connect with a click of a button.