(You can click on it to make it bigger and the original is here.)
Xkcd is a great comic and I Read it religiously. I would recommend it to anyone and everyone, however this post is not specifically about Xkcd, or even the map. But rather a specific part of the map labeled, "Ocean of Subculture."
This ocean (in my humble opinion) is growing steadily larger. Here you can see some of the more common internet-culture sites and communities, like World of Warcraft and Digg, and less common communities, like 4chan and Fark(Fark isn't really, at all, in the same category as 4chan, but on this map it has s similar size).
Now 4chan, a disgusting website, is part of the lowest depths of the Internets. The Internet is kind of like the soil, made up of layers. At the top of these layers are the sites that you may visit daily: Google, News sites, Wikipedia, etc. Now, These sites generally are helpful in nature(or entertaining) and the people are generally mature. The comes the social networking sites, this encompasses a great deal of sites, ranging from mature to 12-year-old. These include, but are not limited to (in no particular order): Myspace, Facebook, Xanga, LiveJournal, etc. This layer of internet-soil also includes social news networking sites, like Digg and Slashdot. The people of these communities are generally like you and I, however, like always, there are outliers. These outliers bleed into the next level of soil which grows exponentially more immature (or mature, depending on how you view it). The layer is lass soil and more rocks and old debris that never will decay. This level is the level of porn. Because there are so many different types of pornographic content on the Internets, there is no room left for anything else in this layer. But this layer isn't the deepest. You, I, and my little sister can easily access porn of they so please, buy Internet's shovel, the search engine.
Below this hard layer of rocks and trash and junk, below the bedrock, is a Subterranean world of the super-nerd. The people of this level are immature, sex-crazed, satan-worshiping, racist, sexist, hateful people (God, I sound like a middle-aged, middle class, Religious conservative). Anyway, these people are not horrible people, they are smart, clever, creative, and more importantly they supply the internet with all things that make it. Their influence spreads to the Surface of the Internet, with things like LOLCATS, Rick Rolling, the face motivators, and other various memes. Remove this part of the Internet and the disgusting "culture" of the internet completely is destroyed; intellegent, hard working people of the world will not supply the internet with a a culture and the average Myspace/youtube user does not have the capibility to make a culture of their own. This culture, the overlords of the internet, define it and shape it how they please.
Finally in these deep depths of the thing one may recognize, on the surface, as the internet are sites where one may find Child pornography, beastiality, and things moredisgusting they you could EVER imagine. So for your sake, as well as your sanity, do not take a shovel to the topsoil of the internet and dig until you cannot dig any more, your intelligence and well your mind are at stake. But if you have the desire to corrupt yourself more than you can imagine, generally the *chans (4chan) are a good place to start (their urls in in .org)(and they are not, I REPEAT NOT, safe for work [or school]). Form there you will be disgusted and never want to ever see anything ever again. And never, even if you need a wikipedia for this level of the internet go to Encyclopedia Dramatica (which you can find on google).
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