A year or two ago, I got an external Seagate disk drive. After giving it a day or so to settle in, my friend asked me if I was having fun with it: “are you gamboling in the gigaswathes:)?” she asked. The metaphor was apt.

There is a topography to our experience of the Internet, and indeed myriad landscapes to traverse, the deeper we delve into the technology. Gamboling might have been a rather frisky way of describing what I was doing with/to/in my hard drive, but I was, at the very least, skipping and humming along. Directory structures (’folders’) are paths that have to be walked, programmatically as well as through mouseclicks: we navigate. There are planes and edges to data, information, and the Internet. There is a front-line, and the front-line is in a line of code. The topography of information—and of the Internet—is being written in real-time. I was gamboling in the gigaswathes.

The metaphor of landscape to describe the experience of creating and of using networked information captures a defining feature of the Internet, which is the fact that its topography—the structure of its links; what links to what—takes on semantic significance, and therefore ideological implication. A group of links has an ulterior motive. If you liken a garden to a website, then the rosebushes, or the koi pond, or the Japanese bridge, or any other arrangement of elements—their design, form and function would mean something, and point somewhere.

Grouping links—creating a web page, or web site—requires certain technological shenanigans, and until recently this presented a barrier to the creation of web pages by ‘lay people’. The forum, and then the blog, were breakthroughs that allowed anyone anywhere to group links and provide multimedia commentary, thus collecting and presenting a point of view, and, in a post-Althusserian world, therefore an ideology. This kind of self-publishing is crucial to freedom on the Internet.

There was a train of thought here. It will pull into the station in part two, I hope.