With Facebook, on the other hand, my "friends" include real friends, family, and colleagues, of a great variety of persuasions, so that any statement of conviction might cause offense to one or more of them. I've come to see Facebook as something of a minefield, and I now limit my posts there to innocuous entries.
All of which has nothing to do with my subject line, and which, having spent thirty minutes composing, I considered deleting. But I'll leave it, because I can.
Doc Searls posts his responses to the latest survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. What is the Internet? We get calls at the reference desk from people wanting us to "pull up" all kinds of information from the Internet, even when the information is more easily accessible from printed sources. The Internet is Magic.
(Edit: a Devoted Reader says my long block quotes are boring, and anyway didn't I just quote Doc Searls a couple of days ago? No, that was Jaron Lanier, an entirely different geek. Anyway, block quote following shortened to the most "funny and interesting" part.)
Digital technology, and the Internet in particular, provide an interesting challenge for understanding infrastructure, because we rely on it, yet it is not solid in any physical sense. It is like physical structures, but not itself physical. We go on the Net, as if it were a road or a plane. We build on it too. Yet it is not a thing.
Inspired by Craig Burton’s description of the Net as a hollow sphere — a three-dimensional zero comprised entirely of ends
— David Weinberger and I wrote World of Ends in 2003 (http://worldofends.com). The purpose was to make the Net more understandable, especially to companies (such as phone and cable carriers) that had been misunderstanding it. Lots of people agreed with us, but none of those people ran the kinds of companies we addressed.
But, to be fair, most people still don’t understand the Net. Look up “The Internet is” on Google (with the quotes). After you get past the top entry (Wikipedia’s), here’s what they say:
Do the same on Twitter, and you’ll get results just as confusing. At this moment (your search will vary; this is the Live Web here), the top results are:
- a Series of Tubes
- terrible
- really big
- for porn
- shit
- good
- wrong
- killing storytelling
- dead
- serious business
- for everyone
- underrated
- infected
- about to die
- broken
- Christmas all the time
- altering our brains
- changing health care
- laughing at NBC
- changing the way we watch TV
- changing the scientific method
- dead and boring
- not shit
- made of kittens
- alive and well
- blessed
- almost full
- distracting
- a brain
- cloudy
(I took out the duplicates. There were many involving cats and porn.)
- a weird, WEIRD place
- full of feel good lectures
- the Best Place to get best notebook computer deals
- Made of Cats
- Down
- For porn
- one of the best and worst things at the same time
- so small
- going slow
- not my friend at the moment
- blocked
- letting me down
- going off at 12
- not working
- magic
- still debatable
- like a jungle
- eleven years old
- worsening by the day
- extremely variable
- full of odd but exciting people
- becoming the Googlenet
- fixed
- forever
- a battlefield
- a great network for helping others around the world
- more than a global pornography network
- slow
- making you go nuts
- so much faster bc im like the only 1 on it
Part of the problem is that we understand the Net in very different and conflicting ways. For example, when we say the Net consists of “sites,” with “domains” and “locations” that we “architect,” “design,” “build” and “visit,”we are saying the Internet is a place. It’s real estate. But if we say the Net is a “medium” for the “distribution” of “content” to “consumers” who “download” it, we’re saying the Net is a shipping system. These metaphors are very different. They yield different approaches to business and lawmaking, to
name just two areas of conflict.
Bob Frankston, co-inventor (with Dan Bricklin) of spreadsheet software (Visicalc) and one of the fathers of home networking, says the end-state of the Net’s current development is ambient connectivity, which “gives us access to the oceans of copper, fiber and radios that surround us.” Within those are what Frankston calls a “sea of bits” to which all of us contribute. To help clarify the anti-scarce nature of bits, he explains, “Bits aren’t really like kernels of corn. They are more like words. You may run out of red paint but you don’t run out of the color red.”
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