Building The Digital World

Distinguish the Internet, World Wide Web, cloud computing, online platforms, and individual applications.

Label clients, servers, protocols, packets, links, networks, and intermediaries on an end-to-end Internet interaction diagram.

Trace one user request through the application, transport, network, link, and physical layers.

Create a research-notebook entry that separates an evidenced mechanism, its evidentiary status, a proposed physical metaphor, the metaphor’s limits, and an unresolved story question.

Identify access networks, last-mile links, backbone networks, autonomous systems, Internet exchange points, data centers, and submarine cables on a network path.

Explain how electrical signals, radio waves, and optical signals carry encoded data through different physical media.

Distinguish latency, bandwidth, throughput, jitter, and congestion using journey-based examples.

Explain how switches use link-layer identifiers to forward local frames and routers use IP prefixes and routing tables to forward packets between networks.

Map the roles of users, access providers, transit providers, peering networks, and content networks in one end-to-end connection.

Predict how queuing, packet loss, duplication, corruption, and reordering affect a transmitted message under different transport assumptions.

Interpret a simplified packet trace or visual packet-capture diagram without writing code.

Storyboard “The Journey of a Packet” from a device to a service and back while preserving technical causality.

Relate processors, memory, storage, network interfaces, and peripheral devices to the execution of a networked program.

Distinguish programs, processes, threads, files, and sockets in a running computer system.

Explain how an operating system mediates access to computation, memory, storage, and networking.

Trace incoming data from a network interface and socket through an application process to persistent storage.

Distinguish physical machines, virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions.

Explain how records, indexes, caches, logs, and backups support different forms of digital memory.

Model permissions, isolation, resource limits, and process termination as constraints on a digital being.

Create a “Digital Anatomy” diagram grounded in operating-system and data-storage mechanisms.

Compare one historical postal, telegraph, telephone, or broadcast system with packet networking, using McLuhan’s insight that media forms reshape social organization while identifying where the analogy fails.

Distinguish ports, domain names, and URLs and relate each to the IP addresses introduced in the preceding module.

Diagram the steps by which DNS resolves a human-readable domain name to an IP address.

Contrast TCP, UDP, and QUIC in terms of reliability, ordering, latency, security, and typical use.

Explain how TLS supports confidentiality, integrity, and server authentication.

Trace an HTTP or HTTPS request and response among a client, web service, and API.

Distinguish identification, authentication, authorization, and accounting in an access-control scenario.

Derive one fictional law, border practice, or cultural custom from a real protocol rule without replacing or contradicting the technical mechanism.

Compare client–server, peer-to-peer, and federated architectures as alternative forms of digital settlement.

Locate regions, availability zones, data centers, edge sites, and content-delivery nodes in a cloud-service diagram.

Analyze how replication and partitioning affect consistency and availability during failures.

Illustrate how a content-delivery network uses caching and geographic distribution to reduce latency.

Trace one transaction across an API gateway, service, message queue, database, and cache.

Explain how retries, timeouts, idempotence, and deduplication manage partial failure.

Show how clocks, timestamps, and synchronization failures can create conflicting accounts of digital events.

Draft a layer of an Internet Atlas that connects technical topology to geography, time, data location, and failure.

Apply Susan Leigh Star’s infrastructure lens to identify hidden maintenance, standards, labor, and dependencies behind a visible digital service.

Use Bowker and Star’s work to analyze how a classification system privileges some identities or actions while making others difficult to represent.

Apply James C. Scott’s concept of legibility to a digital identity or governance system.

Construct a Latourian actor-network map comparing the powers of standards bodies, registries, network operators, cloud providers, states, platforms, technical artifacts, and users.

Distinguish firewalls, network segmentation, virtual private networks, private networks, the deep web, and darknets, identifying which are security boundaries, access categories, or anonymity overlays.

Construct a threat model by identifying assets, actors, capabilities, vulnerabilities, trust boundaries, and plausible harms.

Analyze one platform’s ownership, labor, network effects, rents, and data extraction using concepts from Marxian political economy and Zuboff’s surveillance-capitalism thesis.

Add governance, security, class, labor, maintenance, and ownership overlays to the Internet Atlas.

Classify digital traces as volunteered, observed, acquired, or inferred data.

Explain how cookies, tracking pixels, device fingerprints, persistent identifiers, and identity graphs connect activity across contexts.

Trace personal data from collection through identity resolution, brokerage, audience segmentation, ad targeting, auction or delivery, and measurement.

Distinguish search ranking, recommendation, behavioral advertising, and automated decision-making by their objectives, inputs, outputs, and feedback loops.

Compare Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity framework with Solove’s privacy taxonomy when evaluating a disputed data flow.

Construct an evidence ledger for a case such as Cambridge Analytica, an influence operation, or coordinated bot activity, separating documented events and measured effects from disputed causal claims and broad Internet-folklore claims such as Dead Internet Theory.

Analyze feedback loops and disparate harms in one scoring, ranking, predictive-policing, employment, credit, or welfare system using a relevant framework from O’Neil, Noble, Benjamin, or Eubanks.

Build an evidence-bounded fictional person from behavioral traces while marking uncertainty, missing context, provenance, and inference risk.

Distinguish a stored profile, statistical prediction, behavioral simulation, generative model, and autonomous agent.

Explain how training data, features, labels, objectives, evaluation measures, and uncertainty shape a behavioral prediction.

Use Wiener’s concepts of feedback and control to distinguish prediction, persuasion, optimization, and causal intervention in an algorithmic system.

Diagram memory, retrieval, reflection, planning, action, and feedback in a generative-agent architecture.

Evaluate the methods, findings, and limitations of Park et al.’s “Generative Agents” study.

Distinguish human-operated accounts, scripted bots, botnets, language-model agents, and synthetic populations, and explain how their interactions can produce coordination, conflict, norms, or emergent behavior.

Specify a Shadow’s data provenance, objectives, memory, permissions, available actions, safeguards, and updating rules.

Run a conceptual scenario test that exposes where a Shadow’s prediction or action diverges from its human subject.

Explain how different datasets, model architectures, and institutional objectives produce contradictory representations of one person.

Construct a comparison matrix for platform, advertiser, government, employer, insurer, and personal Shadows derived from a shared human profile.

Model how copying, forking, versioning, unequal access, and divergent experience cause Shadows to separate over time.

Design one transaction in which access to a Shadow is sold, licensed, rented, inherited, transferred, or denied.

Distinguish privacy, data-protection, intellectual-property, contract, consumer-protection, ownership, and personhood questions raised by a Shadow, marking the boundary between existing law and normative speculation.

Apply threat modeling to impersonation, manipulation, discrimination, unauthorized delegation, compromised credentials, and model extraction involving Shadows.

Design one governance mechanism for consent, provenance, audit, correction, appeal, deletion, or refusal to represent.

Stage a conflict in which institutions must choose among the human and several incompatible Shadows.

Use Shannon’s distinction between information transmission and meaning to analyze what a Shadow can and cannot represent about a person.

Apply Borges’s and Eco’s map–territory problems to a model that approaches the complexity of its human subject.

Apply Baudrillard’s concepts of model, sign, referent, simulacrum, and hyperreality to the social recognition of a Shadow.

Use Foucault’s concepts of surveillance, normalization, and subject formation to analyze behavior altered by prediction.

Compare Hume’s bundle account and Parfit’s psychological-continuity account in a precisely defined Shadow-fork case.

Use Chalmers’s hard problem to construct a criteria matrix distinguishing behavioral similarity, intelligence, phenomenal consciousness, agency, moral status, legal personhood, and social recognition.

Use Haraway’s cyborg boundary problem to question the separation between a human and data-derived systems.

Write a reasoned judgment on where the human ends and the Shadow begins in one precisely defined case, stating the philosophical assumptions on which the judgment depends.

Construct a contextual map of selected Yoruba, Igbo, Edo or Niger Delta, and transregional Mami Wata materials by source, region, historical setting, and scholarly interpretation without treating any category as a unitary tradition.

Explain how colonial rule, urban modernity, media technology, and religious change reconfigured one Nigerian discourse about spiritual power.

Analyze one documented Nigerian account of personhood, doubling, destiny, spirit, or agency within its specific indigenous, Christian, or Islamic setting.

Explain how possession, divination, spirit capture, or sympathetic relations function within one specifically sourced tradition rather than within a generalized idea of “African folklore.”

Analyze Nigerian Pentecostal deliverance discourse about occult power, media, wealth, and modernity, using Birgit Meyer’s work comparatively rather than treating Ghanaian findings as direct Nigerian evidence.

Interpret Living in Bondage or Nneka the Pretty Serpent as a narrative about spiritual economy, social anxiety, and mediated modernity.

Create a provenance-and-limits ledger for every proposed analogy between a spiritual concept and a digital mechanism.

Design a “Mythology of the Shadow” that clearly labels documented tradition, scholarly interpretation, adaptation, cross-traditional synthesis, and fictional invention.

Compare portal fantasy, voyage-and-return, episodic odyssey, guided-tour, and nested-world structures using selected precedents from Carroll, Homer, Calvino, Lem, and screen-based journey narratives.

Extract techniques of scale, embodiment, personification, estrangement, interface metaphor, comedy, horror, and philosophical speculation from selected narrative precedents.

Reframe the same Digital World premise as a quest, mystery, horror story, tragedy, political thriller, rebirth narrative, and episodic exploration.

Sequence the accumulated Internet Atlas into a journey whose regions progressively reveal consumerism, infrastructure, surveillance, classification, artificial agency, free will, identity, and reality.

Complete a civilization-coherence matrix connecting technical substrates to geography, physics, biology, economy, politics, law, culture, religion, class, crime, death, reproduction, migration, war, memory, time, and identity.

Draft and audit a technically constrained encounter scene for technical causality, metaphor limits, evidentiary status, cultural specificity, and thematic function.

Create a ten-scene experiment plan and select a provisional adult-novel spine with compatible transmedia extensions without prematurely forcing every region into one plot.

Use the concept-dependency map and research taxonomy to audit the incrementally assembled Digital World Story Bible for technical coherence, philosophical provenance, anthropological responsibility, narrative utility, and transmedia adaptability.