Remember that Internet flash flood when the digital version of the Kenneth Starr-Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinski report was released? Here was the place to watch the action. And when a major gateway goes down, or simply everyone on the East Coast of the US wakes up and logs on, you can see it for a fact.

It's easy to project ourselves some time in the future. Standing in an airport, looking up at one of those TV monitors which would normally broadcast CNN Headline news. Only this time, an Internet traffic reporter would be standing in front of a world map, telling us where all the digital crashes were going into this holiday weekend.

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The basic measurement that the Internet Traffic Report uses is called a "ping," the "round-trip travel time along major paths on the Internet." The difference between one round-trip and another is measured in milli-seconds, but it's the history of travel times taken together that tell the tale.

Every round trip is rated on a scale from zero to 100, where zero means exactly that — there is no response — and 100 means the system is operating at its speediest. Locate these times throughout the world, and the Internet traffic picture begins to reveal itself.

To be clear, the "pings" aren't just launched from a single place, but rather they originate from computers all over the world. And the round trip time is what's important. In the real world, you might do this: Let's ask ten different people living in San Francisco to go to City Hall and return home the fastest way they can. Depending on where a person lived, the time of day, the day of the week, the weather and that bane of urban travel: roadwork, round trip times will vary a lot.

And so it is with the Internet.

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Just like the real world, with everyone trying to get to City Hall in the fastest possible time, the Internet also employs its own savvy taxi drivers. Is it before 4:00 PM? You can still make a left turn here! Is there a Giant's game starting? Take the western route. Only the Internet uses something called "routers," which transfer the tiny packets of data dynamically through the network and are primed for optimal movement. But even cab drivers sometimes find they've outsmarted themselves, and the routers, too, can get unexpectedly bogged down.

Somehow, I find watching all the data flow on Internettraafficreport.com to be enthralling, drawing me in like watching flowing water or a winter's fire.. You see, what you're looking at is never the same way twice. It's both a picture of who we are now, and a glimpse of who we are becoming: You might call it the heartbeat of "digital humanity."

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.

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