CITY CITY BANG BANG
The continuous and unbounded internet …….Santosh Desai
The internet for all its criticality in todays world is an extraordinarily difficult thing to imagine, that is, if at all it is a thing or a place. It is continuous, unbounded and displays no visible organizing principles. Websites can be accessed, but not categorized or mapped, at least in any really useful way. We find it difficult to visualize the internet, for it gives us no maps of any kind. It has no visible scale, shape or form, but seems to contain an infinite array of content which we can call out. Theorist T G McFadden argues that most users suffer from the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when it comes to imagining the internet.
One way to think of it is like a densely populated city without signboards, streets, maps or structure. You need to know what address you are looking for, or at least have some sense of the specific house, family, or anything associated with it in order to reach there. When you reach the place, it exists by itself, without a habitat or neighbourhood. It allows for travel but only through links to other specific places, again without any accompanying surroundings. Another way to think about this is to imagine yourself as a website waiting for someone to ask for you and be clicked on. Unlike the physical world, there is little you can do to ensure that people will come by, except by making yourself interesting. Even then, it can be a long lonely vigil, and as so many bleary-eyed bloggers can testify, endhyperlink is an instant builder of roads, or perhaps more accurately, an instant teleporter, which makes the user jump from one point to another. It is also a leap in curiosity rather than in space. Navigation is nonlinear and controlled by the users interest.