Excerpt:

The most interesting trend in the development of the Internet is not how it is changing people's ways of thinking but how it is adapting to the way that people think.

- Steven Pinker

Hypertext as the death of arcana, or how the click killed curiosity. The depth of the internet is, of course, limitless, a bottomless pit of html that can take us off and away on any number of unexpected byways and diversions. Yet is this expectation of diversion flattening out our experience of the physical world? The days of an internet where every stumble was a moment of true discovery are gone forever, perhaps, as curatorial zeal fast overtakes quiet collectomania as the principle online activity.

~ things~

The internet is awash with corpses. One of the earliest uses of the website seems to have been as a memorial, whether for people or pets. There are numerous online memorials, from eGraves to do-it-yourself concepts like My Last Email. Even if we suppose that a small percentage of these sites continue to be maintained (just like graves in the real world), the internet will slowly and inexorably become a vast digital mausoleum, littered with husks of memory. Sites like YouTube and MySpace will be awash with dead users.

There are somewhere in the order of 4.2 billion unique Internet addresses (IPs), housed on 44 million servers. These consume about 5% of all the world’s electricity and produce about 2% of all carbon dioxide emissions. This amounts to roughly 80 megatons a year and is similar in output to the emissions of Argentina or the Netherlands.

It is comprised of about 40 million gigabytes of information, which, in its simplest form, would weigh something in the order of fifty-six millionths of a gram.

Here the contradiction: the Internet might, theoretically, occupy less space than a single grain of sand, and yet its contribution to global warming is equal to a small country. It is both an immense geographical entity and a miniscule atomic whisper. It exists in a time and place, and yet transcends that to become timeless and aspatial.

It is an emergent system, where a highly-engineered, yet simple, set of rules has allowed for the creation of a massive network sprawling across the planet. The structure of the Internet is a hub and spoke system, in which information is hoarded at central servers and trickled down to individual IPs, making it, in technological terms, far from democratic.

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({ Evan Roth, F.A.T. })

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