I’ve always thought of the Internet not as a place but as a means of connecting other entities — sites, servers, people, etc. (Hey, in that sense maybe it is “a series of tubes”!) From its beginning in the antediluvian mists as what was known as a “network of networks,” connecting pre-existing but now-forgotten networks with a common set of protocols, the Internet was not a destination but a means of transport between other destinations.

So for me, the phrase “on the Internet” isn’t ideal, but it makes some sense as shorthand meaning “on one of those other things that is on the Internet.” But recently I’ve noticed a couple of usages that caused me to stop short. Both were in the New York Times, and from writers who are as or more steeped in Net lore than I am.

In an otherwise highly useful recent roundup of backup services, David Pogue refers to “online backups, where files are shuttled off to the Internet for safekeeping.”

Files “shuttled off to the Internet”? I can picture files that are shuttled across the Internet, to some server or disk array or whatever. But what happens to a file that’s sent to the Internet? I get this picture from the old Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk took a trip through the transporter and didn’t come out the other side; his molecules got scrambled in interstellar space. If I send my file “to the Internet,” I’d really worry about those bits just sort of dissolving into the void.

Similarly, John Markoff’s fascinating piece on botnets from Sunday’s Times, Attack of the Zombie Computers is a Growing Threat, begins with this sentence: “In their persistent quest to breach the Internet’s defenses, the bad guys are honing their weapons and increasing their firepower.”

Does the Internet have any “defenses” at all? Individual Web sites and corporate networks and ISPs do, of course, and they are all scrambling to deal with the torrent of spam being produced by these bot-infected zombie computers.

In a sense, I suppose the Internet has structural defenses, in the form of the relative security of the protocols and conventions users rely on (like encryption), and social defenses, in the form of the people who work hard to stymie the stuff that bad actors do. But these are not really “the Internet’s defenses”; they’re things that people do to defend their Internet-connected computers.

This probably sounds like nitpicking, but I think there’s something at stake in how English usage shapes how we think about the Net.

The great thing about the Internet is that — unlike its “walled-garden” predecessors — it is not a single place with one set of “defenses.” In the memorable words of the “World of Ends” manifesto by Doc Searls and David Weinberger, “No one owns it; everyone can use it; anyone can improve it.” (And, as the botnets show, anyone can try to wreck it, too.) When it comes to descriptions of the Internet, I am instinctively biased towards language that embodies these principles, and my brain registers a little squawk of concern when it encounters phrases that don’t.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Media, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.