The Internet Mapping Project
The internet is vast. Bigger than a city, bigger than a country, maybe as big as the universe. It’s expanding by the second. No one has seen its borders.
And 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.
I’ve become very curious about the maps people have in their minds when they enter the internet. So I’ve been asking people to draw me a map of the internet as they see it. That’s all. More than 50 people of all ages and levels of expertise have mapped their geography of online. Here are three:
You can see them all here.
I’d love to have more folk maps of the internet. You can download a blank PDF here and email it to me when done.
This folk cartography might be useful for some semiotician or anthropologist.
In fact I’ll post the best taxonomies and interpretations of these maps submitted to me via comments or email.
UPDATE: A quick-thinking professor in Buenos Aires has extracted an emergent taxonomy from this first set of maps, as explained here.
