4. Chronotopography of the Web.

The space-time perspective of general relativity theory and its model of the universe developed from the discovery of light speed: messages take time. And our experience of the Internet makes us very aware of this fact, as messages take rather long times over the Internet. The times are related to the distances, but not in a simple fashion. If we used message time as a measure of distance, then the geography of cyberspace would be revealed as a very distorted sphere, or perhaps, not even a sphere. This process, the creation of a topological model for cyberspace from experiential time data, we call the chronotopology of the Web, using a word coined by Charles Mus\s. We may use the notion of isochrons, from chaos theory and fractal geometry, which is the chronotopological equivalent of the contour lines of a topographic map. Fixing one point in cyberspace (for example, a Web server), A, and a message time, T, we consider the set of all other points in cyberspace, B, such a message from A to B takes the same time T. The set of all such points B, with A and T fixed, comprises the T-isochron centered at A. In our Euclidean minds, we think of a circle about A of radius determined by T. We call this process chronotopography.

|| Home ||
|| 1. Introduction || 2. Webometry || 3. The fractal cybersociosphere || 4. Chronotopography of the Web || 5. Strategies for mapping the isochrons from one point || 6.Conclusion || Acknowledgments
Bibliography