How do you visualize the internet? Do you imagine rooms and rooms of spaghetti cables in some dingy back room of Google HQ? Is it an image of internet explorer your old family computer? Or has the internet in your mind been replaced by today's modern cellphones and sleek designs?
I've been thinking a lot lately about how we conceptualize something that's such a big part of our modern lives, but doesn't have a physical form. A common shower thought I've heard people ask a lot is "If we're constantly on our phones, why don't we dream about them?" Which is really interesting. I think we remember things we do on the internet as real events. We like to imagine that message we sent or comment on someone's photo was like a real conversation. To be fair, why wouldn't we? It's not like 50,000 years ago computers appeared and evolved with us. We aren't used to interacting on this scale without seeing the person. Penpals were the only similar thing before the World Wide Web became wildly available. I don't think saying we weren't "meant" to use technology is helpful, though. We weren't meant to use glasses, but would you want a sizable part of the population to suddenly be blind/severely impaired? Because that's how their eyes are? Should we not use aids because "well, if that's how they were meant to be..?"
In how I visualize the internet, I see it as a circle. How else would every single website be labelled their "corner" of the internet? I originally tried to close my eyes and attempt to create a shape where corners protrude off of every possible point, but that didn't work as my minds eye sucks. (And I'm also sure that it's fourth dimensional and therefore impossible for my puny 3d mind to comprehend.) Then, I moved on to imagining each website as a storefront, doubling in on itself in room count for every webpage you add. That was pretty neat until I considered our procrastination overlord, YouTube. 500 minutes of video are uploaded per SECOND. Imagine trying to navigate to the 27365th floor 753th suit in that haphazard mess!!
But an infinite circle of data that never ceases is perfect. It would be like an endless flat earth. The flat earthers of Facebook would be smack dead in the middle, of course. But ykn'know'ow what a circle has infinite of?
It solves my stupid problem! It's beautiful and genius! I mean yeah the technical answer is a sphere but that makes the joke I came up with not work. And I would never ever rewrite my perfectly awesome amazing work. Would you like to buy my selfpublished book, ""?