Deep-sea diving
For a very long time we knew nothing about oceans. We believed until 1860 that there was no life under water below 2000 feet. Amateurs discovered deep-water exploration in the 1930s, descending in tiny bathyspheres to great depths, but seeing nothing in the inky darkness outside their little vessels (all that was between them and nineteen tons of pressure per square inch). Even now, most of the species of animals living in the sea are unknown to us.
(I've been enjoying Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. He says, on p. 281, “We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas.“)
Well, if the internet is the new virtual ocean, we have similar problems. We need an explorers' club to get out there and start making noise and filing reports. In the net neutrality tussle, for example, both sides assert that “nothing has happened yet” — no blocking or degrading of internet access. But is that true? How would we know what we're not seeing, or what we're seeing only slowly?
CAIDA is doing a great job of watching, reporting, and visualizing — can they be funded to go to work to tell us what's going on on the broadband networks here in the U.S. and around the world? (maybe they already are, forgive me if so). The Pew Internet guys are creating strong reports about what people actually do online, on average, and it's revelatory.
Even beyond tracking network performance and standard user antics, it would be great to collect strange online species — what's the online equivalent of the fabled giant squid? The wet variety has “eyes the size of soccer balls and trailing tentacles that can reach lengths of sixty feet.” One can only imagine what the virtual kind looks like.
When terrestrial Explorers Club members are tired of field work, they come home and show off the pelts and horns they've gathered, and they tell stories about what they've seen. But they're starting to ask themselves this question: “What's left to explore?” They should look around online.