As a human, it is incredibly humbling to walk around life realizing billions of other people share a life as complex as your own. You can travel the world, but it’s not possible to have physically occupied every area of the earth’s vastness. The contrast of this vastness with your small presence is a sense of dissonance we grapple with fleetingly, mostly because we are preoccupied with the challenges and thoughts of day-to-day life.
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When we interact with the internet, it is that sense of dissonance amplified. As Drulhe says, the internet knows no gravity or physical distance, it simply is a “concentration of power in a single point incorporating the whole world.” Even as we traverse the web aimlessly on GUIs built for our ease of use and addiction, we expose ourselves only to what is indexable or visible.
As we scroll through simple text, the soundless undercurrents of data and electricity pulse unknowingly at a pace we can neither feel nor hear. While this dissonance feels otherworldly and unknowable, frighteningly and excitingly enough it occupies this same reality. The satisfying swishes and swooshes of Google’s Material Design inoculate us from realizing we are surfing on a sloped plane, its steepness dictated by the shapeless dynamism of well-designed pages.
The “shape”, however, of the internet is especially elusive. Owing to a number of forces at play, not including that it is still expanding, we navigate a projection of the internet through our individual localities. Distortion due to reticular connection, coupled with the ever-changing versions of the various Internets, evokes both anticipation and fear: What can we create, and later, what did we create?
Designed on Adobe Illustrator, the graphic response aims to portray the underlying slope to our searching and browsing.