So I’m trampling my field examination right now and answering the question: To what extent do social divides in the physical world map directly onto those in the virtual world?
Which is great (if vague) and all, but part of my answer includes reference to this guy Castells, who I suggest sees it the other way around: the Space of Flows (will explain in a second) actually runs the show for the physical world – that is that it maps the divides. Here’s a partial explanation:

…It is at this point he advances to his connection between these physical world divides and what, in his composition, includes the virtual world. Castells explains that the dominant logic of the network society is timeless time, the employment of ICT’s “in a relentless effort to annihilate time… to eliminate sequencing of time” (Castells 1997:12). Time is fundamentally connected to space, a tool or relational framework that enables us to understand place and act accordingly. As David Harvey, an informer to Castells’ work, says in regards to globalization, “the time horizons of both private and public decision-making have shrunk, while satellite communication and declining transport costs have made it increasingly possible to spread those decisions immediately over an ever wider and variegated space” (Harvey 1990:147). The compression and desequencing of time facilitates social practices whose material organization is referred to as the Space of Flows: a unified but decentralized assemblage of (1) technological infrastructure and information systems (including the internet), telecommunications, and transportation lines, (2) nodes and hubs tied to physical places, (3) points of gathering for social actors that operate the networks, and (4) electronic spaces (cyberspace) (Castells 1999:364).

Okay, so check it, Space of Flows, totally fine, I like the concept. Timeless time, in my opinion, is a VERY flawed concept. He calls upon David Harvey (apparently the end-all, be-all of postmodernist thoughts, likes words and terms like deconstructionism and the project of neoliberalism) and the old philosopher Leibniz (circa ~1700), who I ended up investigating to validate my criticism. Leibniz suggests that time is denoted by its sequencing – in all incarnations, biological (pre-industrialization, based on ancestry), measured, and even relative (events may seem to take more or less time than one another but we still have cause and effect). This checks out. Castells consistently says that time in the Network Society is a circuit (circular) because spaces have been remapped. The idea is that ICT’s speed things up so much and make space so irrelevant that time becomes eliminated, arbitrary or desequenced.
I CANNOT buy this. Things may work faster, social practices may be rearranged by the speed at which process happen but this doesn’t undermine or dismiss cause and effect. In fact much of our discussion about technology is about dealing with time. We don’t forget or lose history in the Network Society any more than we do as a result of other operational discourses assuming control and wiping out other narratives that make meaning of the human experience (say modernity/rationalism knocking the religious era off the pulpit). David Harvey actually characterizes circular time in a way that would admonish Castells’ argument: “Past, present and future projected into each other accentuating continuity within change; diminution of contingency” practiced by “astrology-followers; archaic societies in which mythological, mystical and magical beliefs prevail.” (Harvey 1990:224)
His examples are bollocks too: we try to make modern wars quick and ignore long ones (okay, true, time still operates here), people can have kids after they’re dead with the saving of embryos (still, cause and effect and sequence here, no kid before the parent), and life expectancy is increasing so we’re becoming more eternal (really? seriously?). Timeless time doesn’t characterize the dominant groups, unless somebody has invented time travel and I don’t know about it. Or is always traveling at light speed and still somehow able to impact events here on earth. Is God behind the space of flows?
What’s interesting is that I can’t find critiques of this. People knock Castells for not doing proper analysis of the role of information, production, and of the relationship between informational labor and capitalism, or maybe for being sorta blatantly obvious in his painting of the information era outcomes, but not for his downright invalid reappropriation of time.
I mean really, I buy pretty much everything else the guy says, but not that time is desequenced or eliminated. Just compressed or altered. Sorry bud.