Randall - "the terms of representation" - what do you mean? I think what I was trying to say is that the terms are circumscribed/dictated by the material...but I still don't know what you mean by terms.

I forgot about globes...obviously there's a lot more going on in mapping than longitude/latitude, and it might be cool (although pretty tangential) to look at how the complex processes used in cartography work to "accurately" reduce 3D space to mappable coordinates. I feel like I'm looking (or trying to look) into an analogous area of processes/ideas/ways of regarding spaces/networks associated with computer programming.

And re: "how different is it that one map represents that proximity of god, and another represents colonial acquisitions?" Right off the bat, I'd say not at all, when you put it like that-- just the somewhat arbitrary visual "depictions" of space as reflecting one or the other ideology...but that's just my gut. It's a cool question.

So far today on me mind: Internet as a city vs. internet as an ocean, possibly with the crowd as a shifting medium that mimics/moves between the two.
There's some really productive overlap between the three articles Wendy sent-- Rafael's article on cell phones, Jameson's article on cognitive mapping, and Manevitch's social media article.
I'm going to think on all that some more, though, and we can talk about em tonight.