This week’s monday-connect resumes a schedule of Mondays. How about an internet classic? Quite some time ago, Futurist and Wired writer Kevin Kelly put out a call as The Internet Mapping Project for ordinary people to draw their own personal hand drawn map of how they saw the internet.
The internet is vast. Bigger than a city, bigger than a country, maybe as big as the universe. It’s expanding by the second. No one has seen its borders.
And the internet is intangible, like spirits and angels. The web is an immense ghost land of disembodied places. Who knows if you are even there, there.
Yet everyday we navigate through this ethereal realm for hours on end and return alive. We must have some map in our head.
I’ve become very curious about the maps people have in their minds when they enter the internet. So I’ve been asking people to draw me a map of the internet as they see it. That’s all.
Kelly shared a downloadable template with a simple prompt “Please draw a map of the internet, as you see it. Indicate your 'home.” and places to include one’s age, occupation, and amount of hours per week spent online.
Kelly collected and posted more than 270 responses in a flickr album, which I can see from dates ranges from 2009 to 2019, and includes ages of 5 to past 70. The variety is stunning, simple to elaborate. But they all say something about how people “see” this space they inhabit online.
For today, download the template, put aside the GenAI prompt box, pick up a pencil and consider doing a 20 minute sketch of your own map.
In the Networked Narratives class I co-taught a while ago with Mia Zamora at Kean University, we asked university students studying network culture to do this activity, a few examples are still on the activity web site.
But for inspiring modern examples, a colleague named Kevin Hodgson, a 6th grade teacher in Connecticut, USA, shared examples of ones his students did recently:
And added some detail when I asked about the assignment:
Enjoy these examples but please, maybe feel inspired to share your own sketch map using the template. Or maybe review the ones Kelly collected and suggest some meaning in the maps over time.
Go mapping!