Undeniably, the internet has a biogeography all its own — a landscape of human settlements distributed according to resources and infrastructure. Digital borders are determined by commercial choices and complicated by user resistance; migrations from platform to platform affect the emotional landscape of communities as they fracture and shift. Metaphors like continental drift, erosion, and fault lines can be useful in trying to visualize the evolution of online trends.
I’m thinking of mapping the many types of divisions of the internet like layers in GIS: the interests layer stacked on the demographics layer stacked on the site/silo layer.
Jeffrey