This, Too, Is the Internet

By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist 

Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu

Column for February 2006

While I was watching the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina coming onshore last August, I heard, among a great many shocking things, something that made me do a double take: One of the news anchors on CNN, during the height of the storm, said that they were about to show footage they had received via FTP.

FTP? Really? That FTP? (According to the blogosphere, at some point people on CNN made it sound either like FTP was brand-new or that CNN invented it; amusing though that is, I’d chalk it up to crisis journalism.) I know FTP is still around, and I even use it now and again. But to hear it mentioned on international cable news? Freaky.

For those of you too young to remember, FTP stands for file transfer protocol, and it’s, well, exactly what it sounds like—a fairly simple protocol for transferring files. (Saying that makes me feel even more aged than having to describe Gopher to my fresh-faced class of new grad students last quarter.) Anyway, this got me to thinking about “the internet” and all its myriad and varied components.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that “the internet” is the same thing as “the Web,” largely because so much has happened there and so much attention has been paid to it over the last several years. I certainly do, even though I know there is a great deal more to it, visible and invisible. Consider the following semirandom and highly idiosyncratic menu of denizens of the internet world:

• A wide variety of communication tools, including instant messaging, chat, webcams, Skype and other telephony systems, plus, of course, our beloved electronic mail, and old standbys like Usenet and IRC.
• Ways for people to share their ideas, thoughts, and lives: blogs, podcasts, scrapbooks, photo sharing, MySpace.com, the new Yahoo 360.
• A large and still growing amount of electronic commerce, including much that is not obvious to the average person, taking place between companies and businesses.
• Ways to interact with governments to get information and conduct transactions, sparing at least some of us from those joyous trips to the DMV.
• Pornography, gambling operations, sites to purchase pharmaceuticals of all kinds, sites run by conspiracy theorists who deny that the Holocaust happened or question the truth behind 9/11.
• Arabic websites often referred to in the news; I took the plunge last year and found a streaming video of what very much appeared to be a beheading of a kidnapped American—I don’t recommend that for family viewing.
• Wikis, including the most famous, the Wikipedia, which was recently in the news following a prank that forced the operators to change their editorial policies.
• Googlebombing, viruses, spyware, phishing, spam, e-mail scams beyond enumeration.
• The ever-escalating arms race of popups and popup blockers.
• Social networking tools and folksonomies, often cited as important aspects of the next generation of search.
• File-sharing systems that occupy such vast chunks of bandwidth on lots of college campuses.
• Every point of view you can possibly imagine and then some, including voices from around the world and assuredly something to offend anyone and everyone—not unlike a library.

They’re all supported by a sophisticated technological and telecommunications infrastructure, with an underlying set of common protocols and standards.

A great deal of the foregoing lives on the Web, or at least travels over an HTTP protocol, and a great deal doesn’t. The internet comprises multiple technologies and protocols and multiple kinds of stuff—so very broad, so very complicated, and so much more than meets the casual eye. As a result, it’s difficult to say the internet “is” anything because of its ever-growing scope and complexity.

The Spock of the new

There’s a sort of parallel-universe, evil-Spock feeling to this. We’ve spent generations understanding and using a universe of analog tools and resources and are reasonably comfortable with them; now this entirely new world of networked stuff opens up, and here we go again. Viewed through that prism, living in the smallest corner we can get away with (i.e., the web) is at least understandable.

So here we go again, picking our way through what could be a minefield of expanded opportunities and potential hazards. We can’t avoid this trek, not if we are to remain viable in an increasingly networked world. Imagine if our predecessors had decided that telephones had no place in the library . . . but that’s another story.