Kevin,
I too am an awe with this “machine” you’ve created!  Is this the “digital us”, I wonder?
In a chapter entitled “The Digital You: What the Digital Explosion is Doing to Your Brain,” Judith Horstman investigates the effects of the internet (among others) on brain power.  In the aforementioned chapter, the suggestion is made that we should, bref,

“forget book learning, physical classrooms, and didactic teaching, even physical books themselves. Brains today learn through internet interaction, wirelessly at lightning speed and all the time, networked globally across social, political and geographical boundaries. Scientists aren’t sure exactly what that’s doing to our brains, but they’re sure it’s doing something, and that microprocessors that will WiFi our brains directly to the Internet are next up” (55).

Does the graph/ web, then, point to the manner in which our brains parcel out information and digest digital activity? Ranging from “greater connectivity, more interactive learning, a heightened visual senses, to more interactive learning and shorthand communication,” the digital native is supposedly one that “absorbs information quickly and in small bites (bytes)” (58). But what about the computer’s relationship to error? To production?  To the typist? Who’s dictating who? (Of course, in respect to this question, we might also think of Chris’s maps/grid works from last week).

Like Jon, I am not entirely sure where to go with this. I was moved by your mapping project, Kevin, and it alone made me want to compose, but my response is perhaps less a response than a mere gesture of appreciation.

Works Cited
Horstman, Judith. “Digital You.” The Scientific American Brave New Brain: How Neuroscience, Brain-Machine Interfaces, Neuroimaging, Psychopharmacoloy, Epigenetics, the Internet, and Our Own Minds are Stimulating and Enhancing the Future of Mental Power. Wiley, 2010. accessed 27 November 2012.

— Genevieve Robichaud