What is the Internet?

The Internet is ingrained in daily life — it’s everywhere (mostly) and connected to everything (mostly). Though, in light of the internet’s ubiquity, can we say, with any degree of certainty, what the Internet actually is?

Many of us, I would suggest, think of the internet along the lines of the IT Crowd clip below. The Internet is a black box, we don’t really know what it’s made of or who manages it and, of course, it doesn’t weigh anything….right?

If we want to move past this black box understanding of the Internet, we need a method to understand and describe it. However, giving a solid and definitive definition to the Internet is impossible and in doing so we’ll only end up reducing the Internet to one thing or another. Instead of one fixed definition, let me try to construct a handful of open ended definitions that resist reducing the complexity of the internet to one thing specifically.

A Note on Method

Before I really get to the task at hand––what is the Internet?––let me make some brief notes on the methodological approach I’m employing. If you don’t care, then skip to the next section!

When we set out to define one thing or another we inevitably have to ask the question of perspective––X is Y according to a specific subject or perspective. If I were to try to explain pizza, for example, I’d say something like “it’s an incredibly popular Italian-American dish. Pizza is usually a 12–14 inches in diameter. It is a greasy, delicious, circle of cheese, bread and sauce.” This definition of a pizza comes from a guy who really likes pizza. While this is a pretty accurate definition of pizza, it is a definition that chooses a specific narrative and specific characteristics over others. For example, another accurate, yet different definition of pizza could be its exact geometric and chemical make up. We could note out the chemical make up of all the ingredients and it would still be an accurate description (what’s the symbol for cheese on the periodic table?).

To really understand an object, it can’t simply be reduced to one thing or another. This is what the Sociologist of Science, Bruno Latour, calls the principle of irreduction. This sounds fancy––and it is––but what it means is that when we start to consider technology and networks (or any complex topic) we should let our definitions breathe and be open, while also maintaining a high degree of rigor. The object of this type of analysis is to let different explanations co-exist and even compound with one another. Pizza is both its chemical make up as well as a greasy circle of cheese, sauce and bread. Both tell us something specific about what a pizza is and how it acts in the world.

If we commit to the principle of irreduction we receive complex understandings of even more complex systems. We don’t get one explanation or one definition, but instead we get many. These different understandings may pull us in any number of ways, but there is never any finality in our definitions and there’s always room for more complexity. If you think this sounds a bit overwhelming, well, you’re right! It is overwhelming.

The Litany of the Internet

If the goal is to understand the Internet with rigor and complexity, I think it will beneficial to follow Ian Bogost’s, a digital media theorist, instruction of laying out litanies of objects that are caught up in the complex network of the Internet. In this practice, we see that the Internet is not one solid entity, but a huge collection of material and immaterial objects––or actants. To make this sort of list, is to construct “…a group of items loosely joined not by logic or power or use but by the gentle knot of the comma” (Bogost, 38).

To begin, then, we just need to start laying it out. What, at any level, is the Internet made of?

Here we go…

fiber optic cables, servers, hardware (hard drives, LCD screens, plastic keys, aluminum), users, office desks, memes, server racks, HTML, TCP/IP protocol, conduit, submarine conduit, text, streamed content, dongles, operating systems, a couch, copper wire, web developers, Design theory, ethernet cables, Google Docs, MMORPGS, wireless access points, network switches, bit torrent, a broadcasting SSID.

All of these objects and actors are all caught up in the Internet in one way or another. Some of these units are a part of the material infrastructure, some address the culture passed over the infrastructure and some are simply the furniture that the infrastructure rests on. Clearly, this is not an exhaustive list, but it begins to stretch what we consider apart of the network that is the Internet.

What is the Internet?

With this extended network in mind and this theoretical commitment to not reducing the internet to solely one thing or another, what is the internet? What are some definitions of the Internet that are specific, yet open ended? What multitudinous definitions might we assemble?

• The Internet is a distributed network––an organizational structure without a mediated central node. These distributed organizational principles mean that any node can communicate with any other node without the approval from any central node or entity. Distribution allows data to be spread out over multiple locations and necessitates the autonomy of every node from every other node.
• The Internet is a globalized computer network that has its roots in both American academia and in the research and development of the US Military between the 1950's-1960's. Paul Baran, at the Rand Corporation, was a fundamental human figure in the research and planning of packet-switching which is integral to the way the Internet handles data.
• The Internet is a mediated communication network that make numerous impactful connections between individuals. On the internet, communities are forged, friendships are made and business is done. People connect through these online platforms and as a result another segment of culture emerges.
• The Internet is a series of tubes––cables and conduit are laid out across the entirety of the earth to connect node to node. For example, in the US, fiber optic cables trace along our highways and interstates. When the cable reaches the ocean, submarine cables are deployed along the ocean floor and physically connected to another continent.

These are four definitions of the Internet––they are all simultaneously correct and exist compounded on top of one another, yet they do not exhaustively explain the Internet. Even more, each one of these Internets act on us in a different way. For example, the infrastructural and technical definitions fade into the background and we barely notice them at all. Each of these less visible definitions still has enormous impact on the way data is passed back and forth. Whereas, the culture of the Internet is what we think of most readily. Surely, we could come up with even more definitions and descriptions. We could widen out network and trace even more complex lines.

There is not one real and true Internet and we ought to resist fixing one of these definitions too firmly. To define the Internet so broadly isn’t to satisfy some philosophical rule, but it has a real functional purpose: a multiplicity of understandings along with a huge network of objects contributing to those definitions gives us––media theorists, engineers, communication theorists, designers, computer scientists business people or other interested parties––a richness of ideas to work from.