The internet is the real-world equivalent of roads. Roads are how you get from your current place to a destination, like work, a shop, a restaurant, or home. The internet is the space you enter to get somewhere too — a news website, an online store, a picture. Travel time on roads is measured in minutes or hours. Travel time on the internet is measured in milliseconds or seconds.
You’re probably like “No shit, Sherlock”. But this is just one of those posts. It serves as a reminder for me and for you to see things as they truly are.
To take it further, the world wide web is a lower abstraction of a city. It’s lower from a human’s perspective because we can’t feel or touch stuff on the internet (not yet). They are only bits. The real world humans can feel and touch entities in a city. Although it’s debatable whether those are truly “real” things or also just bits.
The “Information Highway” isn’t a new term. Bill Gates’ book, The Road Ahead, was about this (interesting trivia: that was actually the first tech/business book I ever read, I think in ’98 or ’99).
But, 20 years later, are these roads fast enough?
Is information retrieval (maps/directories/navigation systems being the analog from the real world) for the internet the best it can be?