This article discusses and analyzes the online phenomenon of Google Earth, which poses a number of spatial ambiguities. By using a tourism perspective emphasizing the dynamics between physical, imaginary, and mediated experiences, four dimensions of Google Earth users’ practices are analyzed: a cartographic, an informational, an emotional, and a social dimension. It is argued that Google Earth facilitates an enhanced spatial and social experience, a spatial augmentation. It demonstrates that the Internet is not a space radically distinct from the space of the “real world.” Rather it is used and included as a part of the users’ social space by constant dynamics between physical, imaginary, and mediated experiences.
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