What is the internet?

What is the internet? What a question. The internet can be interpreted as so many different things depending on how you look at it. I really enjoyed David Weinberger’s interpretation of the internet as an entirely different world than that of our physical day-to-day life.

Many writers and comedians have pointed out that people use the internet as something to hide behind. Somewhere where they can act as differently from their physical self as they want to. They can post mean comments on other people’s work, they can post things that they would never say out loud. People use the Web as a way to reinvent themselves. Starting a new account online is like a blank slate, a way that a person can build a personality from the ground up in exactly the way they want. They can essentially live a life they’ve never actually lead.

The things you see on a person’s page are only the things they want you to see, not the real deal. Even with everyone I know, talking to them face to face is drastically different from looking at their instagrams or even texting them. People behave differently when they have a physical distance to hide behind. I mostly interpret the web as not only a place for anyone to put anything they’d like out in the open, but also as a wall that people use to manipulate how the world views them.