Embodying the Message of the World Wide Web
Date: 2026-09-11
We all know the phrase "World Wide Web" but we can't really see it. When we are "browsing" the web we are in it. We don't see where it connects to because we are "navigating" it. The World Wide Web like any mediuam has a message. The message is that we all have to navigate it like spiders, they call them Web Crawlers for a reason after all.
Each biological body has it's own message, for example there is this classic paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat? that really puts the Mind Body Problem into perspective. Bats use echo location that send spacial maps directly into their brain, hang upside down, fly up to living bugs and pull them strait into the air to eat them. Sure we we humans can imagine doing these things but that requires a lot of effort and cognative modeling capacity, it's certinly not natural to us.
The "spider" also has its own unique way of navigating the world, let's embody it for a second. The prey you caught earlier is a vibration you sense within the web. The web you create isin't a material, it's an externalized nervous system you secrete and then live inside. Eight legs make navigating the world a lot more simpler than standing on two. Eight eyes don't make one picture but act as a survelience system always on standby.
We are embodying the characteristics of the spider when we use the World Wide Web. If you think about it when you create an account on a platform you are externalizing your nervous system just like the spider. When you get a notification from a user or group chat you are hearing a vibation through the World Wide Web. Having eight legs is like having a bunch of diffeent tabs and apps open, you just forget about them until you need them. If you are a 1337 enough nerd doing stocks and OSINT you ought to have some sort of surveilence system monitorying different corners of the web.
But here's the thing, we are humans. We can percieve the entire web of a spider as a visual image, we can describe it's behaviors, we can describe the web using Graph Theory. The medium of the human experience has a different message than the World Wide Web, therefore what is the message of a medium like Mememaps
To be continue.....