Chris Loft - mapping my social networks

As a media research project for uni I am trying to understand my own presence on the internet and to map this presence into some visual and graphic format.

I am going to try and retrace my steps and trace my internet network from its first, faltering stages to the disorganised state that it is in today - and try to make some sense out of it all.

Chris Loft 22 August 2008

In the beginning . . .

First I had one computer. Then another; and then one more. Now I had my own little network - two pcs and a mac, connected through a slow ethernet connection. This is my network, my intranet. I have a number of peripherals and accessories, such as some printers, an audio/MIDI device and a MIDI Keyboard; as well as USB connections to MP3 players, mobile phones and memory sticks.

Here is my first map:

<insert map #1 here>

 

 

What is your internet presence?

My first contact with the net was through my internet service provider (ISP) - this allowed me to connect to the internet and also provided a very small amount of space that I could use for a home page. One of my first actions was to sign up for an email account with Google, and to sign up to some of Google's other internet services.

Here is my second map:

<insert map #2 here>

 

 

 

Phase two - our first domains . . .

My prime reason to get onto the net was to promote music and video clips that I produce on behalf of the Radio Curly Collective, a diverse bunch of artists and musicians from the northern suburbs of Adelaide, sunny South Australia. We registered our first domain radiocurly.com in August 2006 and found some 'really cheap' hosting. [check this date]

After a few months our site was hacked by some nasty hackers and radiocurly.com disappeared from sight. We quickly arranged a new hosting package and put up another site, chrisloft.com and moved radiocurly there - now we had two domains and a growing bunch of web pages.

Here is my third map:

<insert map #3 here>

 

 

Phase three - sub.domains and free web sites

After losing our first website we became a little concerned about keeping all of our data in only one place. We investigated 'free' web hosting services and began to construct a network of web sites on hosted sub.domains -

Different hosting sites offered different plans with a range of services, and limitations. In no time at all we had signed up to about 100 different hosting plans. Some were much better than others, some were terrible; we learnt a lot about writing design using html and css code.

Here is my fourth map:

<insert map #4 here>

 

 

 

August, 2008