The Internet of Memory and Sense

 

The Internet of Memory and Sense

The Text-Based Internet: A Space Without Senses

The history of web design is also the story of humanity’s long journey to reclaim its senses.

The early web was a vast document of sentences and links — a network that connected knowledge,
but not the world we could feel.

Inside the browser, we could read information, but we could not walk within it. The world existed only through code and logic, and emotion quietly vanished within that perfect order.

There was no warmth, no direction, no wind or scent.

The Return of the Senses: The Internet Finds Its Body Again

As technology advanced, the internet slowly began to recover its senses. HTML5 built the structure; CSS added color and form, giving the screen a sense of life. JavaScript brought motion and reaction, while WebGL introduced depth and light in 3D.

Then, 3D engines such as Unity and Unreal reconstructed that space into scenes we could almost walk through.

• HTML5 : the framework that builds the content and structure of a web-page
• CSS : the layer that dresses it with color, typography, and layout
• JavaScript : the mind that gives the web-page motion and interactivity
• WebGL / 3D engines : the technology that renders depth and space within the web

Dourish believed that technology should never be separated from the human body, because the way we feel and act in the world is, at its core, a bodily experience.

His concept of Embodied Interaction — interaction with the world through the body — became a philosophy that calls for technology to work together with human sensation.

This way of thinking resonates with today’s AR, the Metaverse, and spatial web design.

Designing on Reality: The Experiment of Nin.Earth

Nin.Earth continues this philosophy by grounding the internet in the physical coordinates of the real world.

Monuments (digital sculptures fixed to latitude & longitude) are new kinds of design objects that overlay digital forms onto real landscapes, allowing physical and digital spaces to interact within the same frame.

This is not just a visual transformation; it is the spatialization of the Internet, where memory and sense converge.

Nin.Earth is not another world built by technology, but a reimagined Digital Earth where memories accumulate and emotions can stay.