Maps, Territories, and Interfaces — What We Continue to Miss (and aren’t getting back)

Almost a century ago, Alfred Korzybski made a point that is currently in danger of being completely lost: “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” — Alfred Korzybski, S<a href="https://www.holybooks.com/science-and-sanity-by-alfred-korzybski/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">cience and Sanity</a>, p. 58. Some thirty years later, Marshall McLuhan amplified this concept by noting that “the medium is the message” (if not a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">massage</a>), making clear that delivery technologies like television had themselves become “the message”, surpassing whatever content was actually being delivered. In a parallel effort that would later merge, contracts were being awarded in that same era for the development of a packet-switched distributed network called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">ARPANET</a>. This technology would eventually become the foundation of what we now take for granted (and misidentify) as “the internet”. In an additional parallel effort, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Project Xanadu</a> began the work of developing what would later be commercialized (and trivialized) as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Hypertext Transfer Protocol</a>. The rest is history, but it is history that is largely overlooked and taken for granted. “World Wide Web” and “the internet” are considered essentially synonymous to anyone who is not a network engineer. <a href="https://medium.com/@m.martin.pdx/maps-territories-and-interfaces-what-we-continue-to-miss-and-arent-getting-back-d716908e39fd">Click Here</a>