Mapping The Internet

Mapping the internet makes an intangible network spatial: cables, capacity, browsers, and communities become places you can inspect. Start with the physical backbone, then read the social maps as different lenses.

• Why it matters: Without maps, infrastructure and online culture stay abstract and hard to reason about.
• How it works: Submarine communications cables carry telecom signals on the seabed between land stations.
• The big picture: The article treats underwater cables as a major intercontinental backbone layer.
• Reality check: Its Global Internet Map example is dated 2011, so capacity figures are historical.
• The bottom line: Use physical maps for infrastructure, then social maps for browsers, Wikipedia, or Redditland.

The internet is a worldwide network of computers, but it seems very intangible to most of us. In a general sense, the internet is made up of a lot of different components: Websites, users, servers, browsers, networking cables, and more. Some of these things have a physical component, and some of them do not, but even the ones that do have a physical component can be hard to conceptualize spatially. These maps help to lend that spatial component to the Internet.

1. The backbone of the internet is the cables that connect everything. Underwater cables provide many of the connections between continents.
   

   Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

    

2. And the capacity of those cables is important. The 2011 Global Internet Map shows what the capacity is, and how much of it is being used.
   

   Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

    

3. But not all of those cables are used at the same time. Animated Internet Census 2012 shows what regions use the internet as the day sweeps the globe.
   

   Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

    

4. Another critical component to the Internet is how we access most of it. Web browser market share varies from place to place, but can all still be mapped.
   

   by katharinemorgan.
   Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

    

If you stop to think about how browsers have shifted over the years, it's kind of wild that Chrome now dominates so much of the globe, eating up old favorites like Internet Explorer (which, let’s be honest, mostly stuck around because people forgot to switch). There are little pockets—Eastern Europe, for example—that still hang onto alternatives, either out of habit or some other niche utility. Sometimes, these browser choices are just baked into regional technology policies or the quirks of government contracts, nothing to do with user preference at all.

There's always some surprise hiding in these maps. For example, you’ll catch whole swaths of the world sticking with Safari and not just because they love Apple, but because iPhones are simply everywhere and the browser comes standard. And on the other end, some local browsers, like Yandex in Russia or UC Browser in Southeast Asia, stubbornly hang on, carving out their own weird corners of the internet. If you ask around, plenty of people have never even heard of them—but they shape browsing culture in a way that those outside the region rarely notice.

5. The languages of the internet dictate who can understand what portions of it. Top languages on the Internet shows which regions are dominated by which language.
   

   Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

    

6. Twitter follows similar language distributions. The Language Communities of Twitter shows what language geotagged tweets are written in.
   

   Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

    

7. For a broader look at the Internet, check out The Internet Map.
   

   Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

    

8. The Internet Super Subway imagines the internet as if it were a transit system.
   

   Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

    

9. Many internet communities and websites have a geographic component. A huge portion of Wikipedia’s content can be mapped.
   

   Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

    

10. Craigslist covers different regions of the country, all mapped out in the United Zipcodes of Craigslist.
    

    by johnmnelson.
    Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

     

11. And many tweets are geolocated. This means those tweets can all be put on a map, making their geographic density visible.
    

    Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

     

12. Reddit may not have geolocated content, but the subreddits themselves all have relationships that can be conceptualized spatially. The Map of Redditland is one attempt at showing those relationships.
    

    Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

     

The internet is a complex set of systems, and maps of all types can help get a handle on how they all come together.   Drew Skau is Visualization Architect at Visual.ly and a PhD Computer Science Visualization student at UNCC with an undergraduate degree in Architecture. You can follow him on twitter @SeeingStructure