Here is a beautiful visualization of Twitter usage by location in New York City, created and published this week by Eric Fischer. 

That big line down the middle, where the bulk of the traffic is, is Broadway.

That's pretty interesting, to think that most of the Twitter usage in NYC maps to the major artery of traffic in the city.

What's more interesting is to realize that that artery has existed on the island since before Europeans arrived in the Americas.  Before Broadway became a major road clogged with double-decker buses of tourists and carts selling pretzels, it was a footpath for Native Americans to get back and forth across the island. 

Here is a map of the island of Manhattan as it looked at the time of the Revolutionary War:

The lines looks quite a bit like the Twitter map, no?  Not just the main artery running north south, but a few of the offshoots are the same as well.

So the ways in which we interact with the world around us change, the cultures change, and the people change.  But the underlying pathways remain the same.  Everything is built on top of what came before.

How else does that play out in the changing world around us?  Probably in millions of ways every day.