Group items tagged

I'm taking this week's idea of "domains" a bit literally. Here's a quick blog post from Amit Agarwal (tech columnist for Wall Street Journal India). It links to several visualizations of internet activity. Some are physical: electricity; some are political (i.e. explicitly - all these maps are political!): censorship by country; some are social: use of SNS by country, the first edition of the xckd map of internet communities.* He offers these maps without much commentary. I'm interested in how these visual representations could help us think about the "where" of digital ethnography. My offline/physical context may be a coffee shop in Eugene, OR, am I also placed on these maps? What kinds of maps help you think about the "where" of the internet? * The second edition is worth looking at to think about the way time and technological development shapes our understanding of space.

Here's a link to the second version of the xckd map of internet communities. https://xkcd.com/802/ While not a "real" map, I often use it in presentations to explain the idea that online communities are particular and exist in relation to each other. I often pair it with the concept of "fractalized communities" found in Patrica Lange's work in youtube video bloggers. Both get at the specificity of online research; there isn't one internet that I can study - I can only tell you about my time in this particular community.