I just received the May issue of WIRED in the mail, and one of the articles titled “Internet Boom” by Lily Hay Newman caught my attention. The piece offered a brief introduction to Barrett Lyon’s trippy visualization which charts the evolution of the global network. As you may know Scale Free Network theory was played an important role in my doctoral studies and set the stage for my first solo book. So to say I have a soft spot for network maps like this is something of an understatement.
The above video is a network map tracing the evolution of the Internet from 1997 to 2021. It’s a mesmerizing, almost organic visual. But it’s also more than that.
The colors map to regions: North America (blue), Europe (green), Latin America (purple), Asia Pacific (red), Africa (orange), and the internet backbone (white). The lines connect nodes; and the starbursts are internet providers for public, private, and government networks (think AT&T or Comcast or the military). The middle is the most highly connected region, and the periphery the least.
Because it’s animated over time, you can watch different regions come online. Equally, you can see regions blink on and off. Some countries, like China and Iran, linger on the outskirts, with fewer links in and out. This, Lyon notes, enables greater control of national networks, like, for example, China’s Great Firewall. During the Iranian protests in 2019, the government shut down most of the internet—connectivity fell to just five percent of average—and this is clearly apparent in the visualization. Big Iranian networks just disappear.
Jason Dorrier – February 28, 2021
I think its cool. One of the reasons I love network mapping as a tool, is that it helps us to see relationships.
Peace, dwight
