Most Active Worlds residents navigate through their community via the first-person-perspective interface popularized by games like Quake or Unreal. This can make for a powerfully immersive -- if somewhat polygonal -- experience, but the frame necessarily narrows the user's sense of the larger community development. How big is this city? It's hard to tell from the grounded, human-scale view the interface bestows upon you. From street level, the world seems chaotic and patternless, buildings tossed up next to other buildings, stretching all the way to the horizon.
But would it look the same from 100,000 feet? This is the question that Active Worlds' lead developer Roland Villet asked himself, on an "idle Sunday afternoon" a few years ago. After a few quick hours of programming, Villet created an application that scoured the database for the physical co-ordinates of all the structures in the largest space in the Activeworld universe, Alphaworld. Villet then plotted Alphaworld's development on a satellite-style image -- endowing each structure with a color, to differentiate between the various buildings. The resulting picture immediately revealed something new about the Active Worlds community, a pattern of development that hadn't been visible from the ground. But Villet's satellite images also suggest something about the web as well, and how we can learn to see it better.
YOU CAN'T HELP
but be startled looking at these images the first time. They have a kind of orderly disorder that you rarely see in the PowerPoint-style charts that accompany most web logs these days. There's a clear pattern to the shape, but it has the blurriness, the granularity of real-world cities seen from above. We're used to visualizing online usage as the obligatory ascending line of total users, or the pie chart delimiting the market share of the portal space, but Villet's satellite gives us something altogether new: what David Gelernter memorably called "topsight" in his book Mirror Words. It's the view from above.
Why do we seek out these views? Because, in a very literal sense, they give us a new perspective on the world. Notice the star-like pattern at the center of Alphaworld's radiating grid -- nobody had noticed this pattern until Villet launched his satellite, particularly the diagonal lines stretching out from the center. Why did these zones of heavy development come into being? The Active Worlds geography revolves around latitude/longitude-style coordinates, with the center of the world -- the place where new visitors are initially deposited -- marking the 0/0 point of the projection. Homesteaders on this frontier give their x/y coordinates as a kind of street address: "Look me up sometime," residents say, "my place is at 250N, 100E." The diagonal axes simply represent users building their structures at repeated co-ordinates (25, 25), making their addresses easier to remember. Villet himself had been "living" in Alphaworld for some time before he came up with the idea for the satellite images, but the diagonal axes of development hadn't ever been visible to him. "If you think about it," Villet says now, "it's not surprising that people built along those axes. But it was surprising to see how it just jumped out at you on the map."
Looking at Villet's images for the first time made me think about what would happen if you approached the web itself from the same angle. You'd be limited, of course, by the rather shady geography of the web as we know it: Alphaworld has the advantage of being an online world that represents itself spatially, which makes it easy to translate into map form. You could map the web's physical infrastructure -- the location of the routers, or the users' point of entry -- but that wouldn't get to the most interesting thing about the web, which is the flow of it all, the endless movement of traffic from site to site. "The trouble with mapping the web is that when you map things normally you have to have geographic characteristics, and with the web you don't really have that," Villet says. "There's no way to tell how far something is from something else."
AS IT TURNS OUT,
a number of cartographers and information architects have been wrestling with the idea of mapping the web, and the early returns are fascinating, and often visually stunning, experiments. The "Atlas of Cyberspaces" site (www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html) -- maintained by the University of London professor Martin Dodge -- features an entire archive of web-based cartography, including a rendering of router congestion that looks like a spyrograph on acid, elaborate twirls of color rippling across the screen.
But while these images have an undeniable aesthetic appeal, their signal-to-noise ratio leaves something to be desired. "There's a problem with graphical representations of web usage," says industry visionary Brewster Kahle, whose Alexa project has been archiving the web for the past three years. "Any time data comes in this large, graphics usually fails for you. The information is just too complex to represent in an image."
Interestingly, the images that do work in "Atlas of Cyberspaces" are those that cling to real-world space: several maps offer illuminating portraits of web usage per capita, including a telling survey of net penetration in Africa. When I asked Kahle what sort of map he'd most like to see, he suggested something along similar lines: "I'd love to see an animation of web usage mapped onto geography. When did we get Europe? When did it sweep through Italy. We always talk about the internet coming in waves, and it certainly feels that way living through it. But is that really true?"
But I suspect that we will have to move beyond geography if we want to investigate how the web is really used by its citizens. Kahle talks about wanting to see an image that showed what portion of the web audience is genuinely contributing to the web universe -- putting up sites, building home page, and so on -- as opposed to the passive consumers who are simply taking in other sites. "You'd be able to see who's really building the net," he explains. Dodge envisions a map that might also serve as an habitable space, taking us, in effect, back to the first-person universe of Active Worlds: "My ultimate map would be a map inside a graphical virtual world that people could inhabit and share," he explained to me in an e-mail correspondence. "The obvious one is to use the city metaphor, with houses and tower blocks being Internet nodes or web sites. The size, shape and textures of the houses could encode variables." (Dodge adds, somewhat sheepishly, that the idea is "very Gibsonian.")
Online cartography might also help us answer one question that's been haunting the web since its early days: is this a centralized or decentralized medium? Imagine a map that represented repeat visits to a given site as a kind of urban sprawl around a central core, not unlike the Alphaworlds satellite image. What would a map of the entire web look like, viewed from that angle? Would it be a landscape dominated by the huge metropolitan spaces of Yahoo, AOL, and Lycos? Or would it be a more fragmented picture -- more like a series of smaller edge cities, dwarfed by a broad expanse of fringe settlements: home pages, zines, advertisements, storefronts, and so on.
Imagine the same image animated, displaying the web's growth over the past three years. I suspect we'd learn more about the medium from a 30-second movie showing that evolution than from 30 days of surfing. For four years we've been looking at the web from a street-level perspective, roaming from page to page to page. What we need now is a little bird's-eye-view. Bring on the satellites!
Steven Johnson is editor-in-chief of FEED and author of Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms The Way We Create And Communicate. Josh Rubin contributed to this report.
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