Ethnological Mapping of the World Wide Web
In class, we are currently discussing the structure of the World Wide Web. Maps of the WWW, as well as the strategies implemented by search engines, use hyperlinks between websites to measure importance and connectivity. These methods weight a node’s (website’s) prominence by how many links are directed towards them. Mapping internet usage, often done by methods such as this, is important in many fields, from marketing to certain consumer groups to measuring information access and freedom. This link-based measure of the WWW is described by Wu and Taneja as “media-based”, susceptible to misinterpretation from unused links or blocked domains. Wu and Taneja use traffic to major websites to measure online cultures’ Web usage.
Wu and Taneja describe a usage-based map of the WWW. By using a force-directed graph, they depict internet usage in clusters. Over time, regional clusters outside the US have grown and become more distant from the US cluster. Studying these graphs of the WWW illuminate the development of these cultures, particularly in the Southern hemisphere. To companies, they may suggest increased opportunities, not seen in traditional link-based maps, to expand markets in the Southern hemispheres. In addition, they show that other online cultures are relatively isolated from the US-centric culture that traditional methods show to be most prominent. While some of this isolation is caused by the action of governments (i.e. censorship), the rest may be decreased by action to diversify web content and make it available across languages.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/jcc4.12157/asset/jcc412157.pdf;jsessionid=F0B11D8A62C2939A625582DD206DFAFB.f04t04?v=1&t=iu3bg8em&s=5fd49afa2a7c186ac9c4cab282f0957e5e746d26