26 Nov--The Internet Spectacle

The Internet is the largest, most-frequented place in the world. More so than Paris or New York. More popular than Disneyland. Yet an inherent charactaristic of the Internet sets it apart from these tourist destinations. The Internet doesn't exist.

Sure, the Internet is real. One may verify its real-ness by the simple process of reading this blog. However booking tickets, downloading music, and reading a blog are all interactions. You perform these actions not so much in the Internet as with it. The Internet facilitates your needs; it gives you what you want. But is it truly there? And what do we mean when we use the term "the Internet?"

The phrases "it's on the Internet," "go to the [Internet] site," and "use the [Inter]net" are all so common they've been abbreviated and lingo-ed a dozen times over in the past five years alone. We talk about it as a place to go, as a thing to use, and as a spectacle--something to see. It is entertainment. It is business. But reduced to its most bland, the Internet is invented space: a dimension of data pinging between nodes. More like the human brain than the nether reaches of the universe, the Internet can easily cease to be. Cut off blood supply to a person's brain, and that person is no longer. Likewise, switch off the power, and the Internet dies in a blink. No swan song or last breath, no sputter--gone, like it was never there to begin with. Its only ghosts haunting in the form of old advertisements and technology mags.

The Internet is both dreadfully important and delightfully fragile. It could also be used as an example of a spontaneous exercise in evolution: we haven't been taught how to use it, but we are using it anyway. We seem to understand that it can never break, per se; it can only be shaped.

So the Internet doesn't exist, but it could cease to exist. It's crucial, but we could live without it. It can be altered beyond recognition, but remain the same. One thing is almost certain: it is just beginning. Are we not like Dr. Frankenstein with his newly moulded--but lifeless--creature? The words we hesitate to speak are waiting. We need merely click the hyperlink: "by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open . . ."