The Geography of the Web
Mike Gunderloy
The first thing I do every morning is take care of the outside chores. The second thing is to put a pot of coffee on to brew. And the third thing is to come up to this computer and make my usual morning rounds.
Somehow I tend to think of the Internet in geographic terms. Not that I associate web sites with their actual location, or have a mental picture of a house like a medieval memory museum; rather, it’s that I feel like I’m moving around in some large but ill-defined space, rather than bringing the web to me, even though I stay stationary in meatspace. Perhaps this is just an artifact of the verb “navigate” being so prevalent on the web?
Anyhow, my rounds start out with running an analysis on our overnight web visitors. While that’s running, I check my Outlook inbox. I have a bunch of rules set to split things up into multiple folders as they trickle in overnight, but there’s always a residue in my Inbox. Half of that is usually spam; there are also daily news reads like the Information Week daily. Most mornings there’s also mail from at least a few of my mailing lists; Attachment-parenting, H2G2, ITG and the various weblog lists are usually good for at least a few messages each.
Then I switch to another computer screen for my morning surf of sites I check out every day. Actually, there are a few other sites like SlashDot that I check out every morning, but which aren’t on that page Well, I never claimed to be consistent. (And don’t feel unloved if you’re not on the list; I also monitor dozens of sites via MetaWatcher, but that’s a story for another day). It’s this part of the morning that feels the most like travel to me, as I move around from place to place according to a fixed itinerary. Oh, it changes from time to time, as I add sites to or delete them from the daily list, but on the whole there’s a sense of familiarity to it, as each site comes in its proper place in the sequence. It reminds me a bit of taking the subway to college when I lived in Boston; the stops always came in their proper order, and each had its own unique character. My immediate surroundings – the subway car or the computer screen – remain the same as I travel from place to place.
Once that’s done I’m usually on my second or third cup of coffee and ready to get to work. But every once in a while my mind wanders back to the geographic metaphor. What strikes me the most about it is the isomorphism between real geography and web geography. No, there’s no Los Angeles in the web, no small town in eastern Washington. But there are slashdot.org and larkfarm.com: a major hub of travel and discussion and a tiny backwater, respectively. Just as traffic in the real world piles up in major business and commercial centers, traffic on the web piles up at a few major sites. Many more smaller sites get perhaps one visitor a week, just like small towns in the hinterlands.
Although getting to any site on the web merely requires typing an address into the browser, it’s still much easier to get to well-known sites than to mysterious small ones. That’s because of the linking nature of the web and the size of the sites. You’re much more likely to hit CNN than Joe’s News of Nowhere on a search, just because CNN has published more pages on the web than Joe will ever generate. Back in the “real world”, with enough money and effort you can get to any small town in South America these days — but it’s a heck of a lot easier to get to Cincinnati. Again, Cincinnati has more links and is easier to find out about.
There’s a danger in using metaphor for understanding, of course: that we might let the parallels lull us into believing there’s an exact mapping between physical travel and web travel. For example, when I was driving around the country in an RV, my favorite mode of travel was to just head down one of the less-traveled back roads and see what town popped up next. There’s not really an equivalent to that on the web. The closest I’ve found is to just type random words into a search engine and see where they lead me. I wish there were some more exact equivalent to quietly motoring down the road and enjoying the scenery on the way to some unknown destination. But then, the web isn’t really a geography. Or if it is, it’s a geography akin to that of dreams and literature as well as to that of the physical world.
Mike Gunderloy writes the weblog Larkfarm