I want to start this post off by expressing my general feelings towards the Internet; or rather the culture that the Internet has created. As someone who currently gets paid to work from home – and as a result has to default to messaging apps for basic communication – I am constantly muttering to myself that I “hate the Internet.” I mean, that’s not true – but I guess what I’m trying to say is that I hate ideas and fads that the Internet is making or has made popular. I also love a great a deal of things the Internet is making or has made popular. Maybe I’m just getting old…
And I like to think of myself as an “old soul.” Whether that is true or I just think it sounds cool has yet to be found. But I mean “old soul” in the sense that I prefer real contact with humans and/or nature over cyber contact with someone or something that I can’t see, touch, or physically interact with. I find a great deal of wealth in body language, tone and atmosphere. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t participated in my fair share of online commenting or interaction.
Something I found very interesting in ‘The Internet Behind the Web’ is that the culture of the Internet – that being the culture of open dialogue, sharing and cohesion – didn’t happen when file sharing or AOL became popular. Rather it is essentially the element that brought the Internet to its feet. From the first half of the documentary and my layman’s knowledge of Internet history, I simply imagined a bunch of (for lack of a better term) geeks wearing tweed blazers and thick-rimmed glasses scrunched over massive computing devices typing complex code that produced simple results. But what Bob Metcalfe and the birth of ‘The Net’ taught me was that the creation and development of the Internet was much more of a creative process than I ever gave it credit for.