You Are Here
a short trip...
In the course of planning and designing a website, I've started to wonder how the internet became a place. It's a fairly new concept as a whole, and somewhere along the way as it has grown, we gradually decided to think of it as a place. We chose terminology appropriate to that idea. There are sites you find at an address. You can go into a chat room or go to a page. You can view a gallery or library. You start out and return to a home. Every mailbox has a place it's @. Yet all this real estate is in your head. It's imaginary. Of course, the information that makes up this imaginary landscape is kept somewhere. Even the airy "cloud" you picture is a heavy, earthbound mass of silicon and wiring somewhere in the physical world, or rather several masses. But that information is what constitutes the internet, not the machines it's stored on. The internet is really an idea. It's a thought or the collected thoughts of its users. People can't put their fingers on intangibles like that, so we compare them to real world things. That way, they're easier to understand, easier to explain to others, easier to work with every day. For the same reason, the internet could have become a thing instead of a place. Here and there, you can see elements of that concept, but it just settled better in people's minds as a location. So, this must be the place.
In the course of planning and designing a website, I've started to wonder how the internet became a place. It's a fairly new concept as a whole, and somewhere along the way as it has grown, we gradually decided to think of it as a place. We chose terminology appropriate to that idea. There are sites you find at an address. You can go into a chat room or go to a page. You can view a gallery or library. You start out and return to a home. Every mailbox has a place it's @. Yet all this real estate is in your head. It's imaginary. Of course, the information that makes up this imaginary landscape is kept somewhere. Even the airy "cloud" you picture is a heavy, earthbound mass of silicon and wiring somewhere in the physical world, or rather several masses. But that information is what constitutes the internet, not the machines it's stored on. The internet is really an idea. It's a thought or the collected thoughts of its users. People can't put their fingers on intangibles like that, so we compare them to real world things. That way, they're easier to understand, easier to explain to others, easier to work with every day. For the same reason, the internet could have become a thing instead of a place. Here and there, you can see elements of that concept, but it just settled better in people's minds as a location. So, this must be the place.
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