Social Media, territorial competitive advantage?

Building up on the first sessions we had, social media connection could be a strong economic growth driver.

It is well documented that the main factor for a city to be sustainably rich and successful is mainly connections.
The so-called alpha cities are hubs for transport and communication networks.

We could think that social media and internet could lower the relative importance of those hubs but keeping up with the pace of increasing data flows requires huge invesments (cable, 3G and 4G networks) collectively but also individually (smartphone, ipad, laptop,...).

I then wonder if social media growth will not increase the global economic disparities.

For example, here is the submarine-cable global map (higher resolution on http://www.iscpc.org/).
Striking example of infrastructure development and economic growth