First I asked a student to circumnavigate the building by walking at a natural pace. It took a little over three minutes. Then I set up a team of "semaphore" relays (students) at the corners of the building and at our classroom door. I arranged to send the "one if by land, two if by sea" signal with my raised arms, and we had a student with a stopwatch on her phone timing it. Another student paced off the building so we knew the approximate distance. Let the experiment begin.

First trial. I raised one arm, and the student at the door instantly raised one arm. Out of sight, a second student relayed the signal to a third, then it passed to a fourth and fifth, and then a spotter at our classroom window saw the fifth student raise one arm. The moment he raised his arm, everyone in the room yelled out, "One!" to bring the trial to an end. We tried three times, sending either "One" or "Two" through the system, and out best time was about five seconds.

Here's the very rough math: In about five seconds the visual sign was relayed about 500 feet, or about 100 feet per second. With five or six relays each taking a portion of a second to raise their arms after seeing the signal, of course most of the five seconds was used by human reaction time. Obviously, the signals themselves travelled at the speed of light, much faster than 100 fps.

Why bother with this wacky experiment in a college class? Because I wanted everyone to have a concrete experience in which they saw how profoundly a new technology can change a system of communication. At work, if you could save your boss 2% of waste in production or speed up production 5%, you'd deserve a nice raise. We cut the travel time from walking, over three minutes, to semaphore, about five seconds. We cut about 96% of the communication time out of the system with semaphore. And at the end, our voices branched out the way social media does, in effect not just speeding but amplifying.

But the lesson is not just speed of communication. Semaphore only works if the network is in place. On the Internet, that means not just the Internet but some structure of affiliated people and groups already in place, a subset of the Internet, attending to signals from each other because they care about something in common. The speed of communication is utterly transformed, in such cases, just as it was in our class today: tweets came from Tahrir Square, for example, to the far side of a 25,000 mile circumference globe, in moments, to those who were already connected and had the skills and cared about the Arab Spring. The elaborated web has to be in place already. (Not just the Internet, which is the carrier but not the actual affiliation. The Internet is the potential for affiliation; acts of affiliation make the potential real.)

And once the message hit the elaborated network already in place, if the ends of the fibers have traits like social media, then branching takes place. The message is compounded or amplified. If the network has social media traits, then the elaborated web not only speeds the messages along but also amplifies them.

If within the Internet we have already created an elaborated web of people who care about what we care about. If we have built up our skills. If we maintain the links. If we keep somebody from shutting the system down in a crunch. If we understand the work needed to turn the potential of the Internet into an actual elaborated network that can then speed and amplify. If, if, if.

But it works. The concepts are clear.