It’s time for the small-i “internet”
The Internet is not a brand name — it’s a commodity. Let’s give it the respect it deserves and treat it as such.
I went to school for newspaper journalism in the early 2000s; the final days of when one actually went to school for newspaper journalism and wasn’t completely batshit crazy or just deluded. While the Internet was well past its infancy, it hadn’t (warning: hipster phraseology ahead) quite hit the mainstream as it has now.
That’s when I learned Associated Press style: the format journalists use in their writing. It’s beautiful in its simplicity — AP style’s primary goal is to express the most information possible in the least amount of space. So, instead of saying “although,” for example, you’d say “though,” saving yourself two characters but not changing the meaning of your sentence. It’s elegant. It taught me to use my words efficiently to have more impact. It ruined me for the academic papers I had to write and the flowery, verbose language required by MLA style.
AP’s also pretty good at changing with culture, especially Internet culture. Originally, “website” was supposed to be written “Web site,” and “email” was “E-mail”. As Internet users themselves adapted, “website” and “email” became the norm. Pretty soon, AP followed suit.
The one thing that seems to have stuck around both in AP and, well, everywhere else is “Internet,” with a capital I.
I argue that it’s time for that capital letter to go. The Internet is as present in our lives as cars, electricity, phones, and air. We don’t capitalize those nouns, do they?
The capitalization implies a proper noun, like Wikipedia, Samsung, or Google (though arguably Google is becoming generic enough to warrant a lower-case usage in its verb form).
But Andy! you might say. The Capital-I Internet is a powerful thing! We should all show it the respect it deserves!
I totally agree! All of my coworkers and I would not have a job without the Internet. We definitely respect the Internet.
But we know the Internet is a tool. Ubiquitous though it is, we manipulate it every day, and use it and its standards and protocol to convey information in (we think) an attractive and efficient manner. It’s not an entity unto itself (until SkyNet goes live, of course), and it’s not a brand name. It’s a commodity. It’s a community. It’s a tool. (You wouldn’t write, “Pass me that Hammer,” would you?)
I say we stand together, and teach our spellcheckers that internet is spelled with a small “i.” Language is ever-evolving, and rather than try to lobby for new words like “gr8″ and “I’ma” (as in “I’ma let you finish”) to find its way into dictionaries and stylebooks, let’s improve the accuracy and precision of our lexicon and give the internet its propers by referring to it as what it is: a tool.
Postscript: After writing this editorial originally, I came across an article on Wired all the way back in 2004, “It’s Just the “internet” Now”:
But in the case of internet, web and net, a change in our house style was necessary to put into perspective what the internet is: another medium for delivering and receiving information. That it transformed human communication is beyond dispute. But no more so than moveable type did in its day. Or the radio. Or television.
