al data handling; a series of technologies for collecting, manipulating, and representing spatial information; a way of thinking about spatial data; a commodified object that has monetary potential and value; and a technical tool that has strategic value (p. 3).
Not only is GIS multifaceted in its technical capabilities, it is multidimensional in its social and cultural capabilities as well, allowing for new demographic tools, new forms of workplace domination, novel commodities, new ways of identifying space and nature and new ways of waging war (Pickles, in Pickles, 1995, p. 4).
Perhaps the most important contribution that GIS has offered is the ability to join the physical description of space û what one might call the cartographic aspects of geography û with the humanistic geographical focus on the individualistic experience of place and environment. Physical geography has long had a positivistic bent stressing the importance of regularity and order and elevating impartial empirical observation. Humanistic social geography highlights individual experience and includes affective and cognitive elements of perception (Johnston, in Johnston, 1985, p. 16). The technological flexibility and sophistication of GIS allows for a meshing of these two types of mapping and this no doubt accounts for the basis of its popularity: GIS allows geographers to create maps that reproduce not only the physical features of the earth, but also the characteristics of populations living in proximity to those physical features and cognitive, psychological and social aspects of the relationships of those populations to their physical environments.
However, while such capabilities sound entirely beneficial, they are not unproblematic, as g
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