London Underground map

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It’s not really a map; it’s a diagram — it has, at best, a tenuous relationship with the actual geography of London — but to many people (including me) it’s the only map of London there is. As I’ve experienced it, London is a collection of islands, joined only by an elaborate network of tubes. The London Underground map is London.

Section of the London Underground map around Victoria

So… the internet (and by internet, I mostly mean the web). Physically, the internet is just a lot of computers linked together; sending, receiving and routing packets of data (through, oddly enough, an elaborate network of tubes). That’s just machines though, that’s the way they see it.

What I’m trying to say is; the way I experience London through the Underground map is somehow related to the way I experience the internet through Safari and Google. And in the same way that most of London is left off that map, to be forever unexplored; much of the internet is floating around in unexplored obscurity, not linked into the Piccadilly Line of the web.

I want to go exploring.

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