A few thoughts on how far apart things can be in a virtual world.
I’ve previously said that distance doesn’t exist on the internet, and that the internet doesn’t have any corners.
This is true in some ways, but less true in others.
There are many ways you can try and conceptualize distance on the internet. The question is, which ones are useful?
How about physical distance?
The database and web server for this blog live on a computer in a room somewhere. They’re physically distanced from other computers on the internet. So it is possible to say that my blog is closer to some websites than it is to others, because my web hosting provider is a shared provider that hosts multiple websites on the same computer. There are a random handful of websites which are physically close to mine, because they are hosted on the same machine.
Of course, it’s not at all useful to say this, because electrons travel at the speed of light, so from the point of view of, “How long does it take to get there from here?” it takes electrons the same amount of time (practically speaking) to get from anywhere to anywhere else. It’s a weird property of the internet that means that our old concepts need not apply.
More relevant in making things take longer to get from one place to another place is the number of network things in the way. Routers, switches, network conditions. This is tough to measure, however, because in these terms, there’s no fixed distance between two points. Data Packet routing on the internet is dynamic; as certain networks become congested or undergo maintenance, there ceases to be one shortest distance from here to there. Or from there to here.
If physical distance is not particularly useful as a concept of internet distance, physical time is not particularly useful, either.
But at least thinking about the question, “How long does it take to get there from here?” is a step forward.
Maybe if it’s not a measure of distance per se, it’s at least getting to the heart of what we care about. Even in real world distance, more often we care about how long it takes to get there than how many miles (or kilometers) it is. And if we ever do care about physical distance, it’s because we want to know if we’ll have to get gas.
Well, if gas is cheap (and I mean really, really, fly around the world seven times on a drop cheap) we can afford to drop the need for distance altogether and just talk about how long it takes to get there.
We can bump it up from a physical time question to a personal question. How quickly can a person get from one place to another on the internet? That’s a fairly good measure of distance, isn’t it?
At last we’re getting somewhere, but once again the internet renders our proposed measuring scheme somewhat useless, because it has Google.
Via Google, getting from anywhere to anywhere else is pretty quick. It’s the magic teleporter. In a world with built-in teleportation, distance as a concept starts to diminish in importance.
There are still nuances, though. If you don’t show up in the first 10 google hits, are you farther away than the first page results? Not all sites are equally googleable. If you’re worried about the time it takes to get someplace, then some sites are closer to you than others, with the most googleable site being the closest.
Actually, Google itself is the closest, because it’s the most googleable site of all. It’s certainly closer than any other site on the internet.
Now it seems that the measure of distance seems to be the importance of a site. More important sites are closer. Bigger sites (and not in a physical sense of bigger) are closer.
As soon as you say this, however, you have to step back and see exactly how different a world you’re playing in, becase if Bigger things are Closer, then you have to accept the fact that distance on the internet is directional.
Bigger sites are Closer to every other site.
Smaller sites are Farther from every other site. Even from the Big ones.
BBC News is close to me (big, important) but I’m very very far from it. We have this same notion in the real world, but it’s pretty weak. An example might be cycling on hills. Physically the distance from top to bottom is the same, but it’s a very different experience going up and coming down.
But so far, I’ve only talked about Google. It’s far from the only means of navigation on the internet.
I guess there’s more for Part II.