Ordering The Chaos: The Internet Mapping Project
Dissecting the interwebs, or what digital toddlers have to do with infinite loops.
You know we’re in dire straits when Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web, says we no longer fully understand the Internet.
But Wired magazine founder and chronic digital culture explorer Kevin Kelly has set out to dissect the fabric of the web. His Internet Mapping Project is an effort to understand how people conceive of the Internet through a series of user-submitted hand-drawn maps.
The internet is intangible, like spirits and angels. The web is an immense ghost land of disembodied places. Who knows if you are even there, there. Yet everyday we navigate through this ethereal realm for hours on end and return alive. We must have some map in our head.
So far, there are close to 80 submissions by people of all ages, nationalities and expertise levels, ranging from the concrete to the conceptual to the comic.
The project has also sprouted further analysis of people’s understanding – Argentinean psychology professor Mara Vanina Oses has distilled a fascinating taxonomy of the maps themselves.
Our favorite submission is a visceral stride-stopper that manages to communicate the nature of the Internet with brilliant simplicity, capturing the sea of interestingness that surrounds our homebase of curiosity.
Each submission asks for the person’s age, occupation and average daily hours on the web. And while the diversity of entries is astounding — from an art student to a jazz musician moonlighting as an IT consultant to the manager of the 10,000 Year Clock project — we did notice some interesting correlations.
Those who spend the most time online, for instance, have the most abstract of drawings — perhaps an indication that a truly rich understanding lives in the realm of the abstract and conceptual, not the concrete, providing a big-picture view not of what the Internet does or offers, but of what it is: An infinite loop of possibility.
At the same time, those who spend the least amount of time tend to put themselves at the center of the Internet — a sign of the “developmental psychology” of the web, wherein “web toddlers,” just like real 1-4-year-olds, adopt an egocentric worldview, while “web adults” are better able to shift perspectives and see the collective context of it all.
Download, sketch, and submit your map today.
- Show & Tell: Mapping Obama’s Speech Obama's inauguration speech, graphically facilitated in (almost) real time....
- Mapping Big Ideas: BIGVIZ Free 200-page PDF book visually captures the talks, themes and connections from the 2008 TED Conference....
- The Other Happiness Project New York magazine writer Gretchen Rubin tests the multitude of theories about what makes us happy, from ancient philosophies to pop culture prescriptions to the latest scientific studies, and writes about the results....
- Heart of a City: BioMapping Fascinating crowdsourced mapping project records people's emotional states and correlates them with their geographic location, visualizing the collective emotion of a community....
- Crowdsourcing 2010: Behind the3six5 Project the3six5 project aims to crowdsource a snapshot of 2010 by inviting different, compelling personalities to blog each day of the year. Here, we interview the founders....
[...] | Brain Pickings SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "‘The Internet Mapping Project’: los mapas de Internet", [...]
[...] Popova, Ordering The Chaos: The Internet Mapping Project People draw their own image of the [...]
[...] effort to crowdsource something equally widespread yet equally subjectively understood in The Internet Mapping Project. And it bespeaks the seemingly obvious but surprisingly poorly honored idea, not far from Buddhist [...]
[...] ainda tem uma análise interessante sobre o perfil dos participantes, que tinham que responder quantas horas passavam na internet por [...]