In this new series we look at musings, notes, ideas, and narratives straight from Matador Community Members’ blogs. We start with an idea by Marie Szamborski, known at Matador as ThreeSpoons.
Internet map by The OPTE project
AFTER READING the following post by Marie, I started wondering how to visually represent what she was talking about.
Then I found (duh) there actually are people mapping the internet via IP address as well as other metrics which, to be honest, I don’t really want to even try to understand.
Marie wrote:
When I start reading a blog or a Tweet by someone I don’t know and then click on one of their contacts’ blogs or something else on their page, it seems I inevitably end up on the page of someone I know from Flickr, Twitter, my own blog readers, Matador, etc. How is that? Are we all getting our contacts from each others pages or is it just that the people you are friends with just have the same taste as you? I’d really like to see a drawing of the map I take when on the net and how it matches up with the map of others. Do they have that yet? I’m sure I’d be going round in circles and eventually passing through the circles of others.
Marie goes on to describe a scenario wherein the virtual friending or unfriending of social media contacts plays out in the real world. You simply meet someone and instantly, effortlessly accept or reject them.
But what I loved more than anything about this post was the notion of just going around in circles, bumping into others, and the inherent tendency to form tribes (something Seth Godin would surely approve).
What speaks to me, what interests me about social media, microblogging, ambient awareness, location ‘independence’, accelerated culture (Does that term still apply? Does twitter make us ‘post-accelerated’ culture?) basically the entire amorphous realm of computer mediated communication, is that there really is no map, no precedent. Like Marie, I could use a drawing.
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7 Comments... join the discussion!
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Hmmmm, Six Degrees of Seperation?
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I think my brain just blew up. Interesting idea, but it is like trying to trace “God” to the beginning of time.
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When I first read Marie’s blog, I associated to six degrees of separation, but deeper. Really loved her articulation of this idea.
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Sweet as! Thanks David, and thanks everyone for the comments. It’s so cool to get feedback on things you write. That map is beautiful. I’d love to put that on my wall as a piece of talk-art. In my mind, my map was something akin to a Venn Diagram overlapping wherever I have an interest in common with someone else. But instead of just a couple of circles, there must be millions upon millions. Not sure how that would work, but hey, I’ll leave that to the scientists!
In reference to the degrees of separation comments, this is something always in the mind of Kiwis. It’s no joke that here, if you didn’t have some role in the production of one of the Lord of the Rings films…you know someone who did. Maybe the inter-sphere (I made that term up) is just a fast version of New Zealand!?
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Yes, the pic is gorgeous. Brings to mind some sort of neural brain imaging–which probably isn’t far off.
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I prefer Chappelle’s idea: what if the internet were a place you could go to?
http://www.buzzhumor.com/videos/4123/Chappelle
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