Is it Meaningless to Talk About \u27the Internet\u27?

Abstract

This paper suggests that there is no longer any fixed meaning to the term \u27Internet\u27. Instead, the Internet is created anew in the hands of each individual user and reflects their prioritie!i and interests. At the same time, the dynamism of Internet innovation and development is such that a burgeoning range of options has become available, allowing Internet users to customise and create their online environment to approxima.te a personal manifestation of what we might call, in a generic sense, \u27their Internet\u27. In part, this shift has been reflected in something as mundane as the everyday usage of the word. Just a few years ago, the word \u27internet\u27 would have been identified by MS Word as an error, unless it had a capital \u271\u27. Now that word-without the capital letter-is accepted. [This journal still prefers \u27Internet\u27. Ed.] The Internet is no longer a proper noun, like a place: instead, the word \u27Internet\u27 is more frequently used as an adjective or a noun-a general category of thing, as in \u27internet shopping\u27 and \u27internet research\u27. This paper looks at whether we can still have a shared meaning around the concept of \u27the Internet\u27 and, if so, what that meaning is and how and where it is confounded in everyday and emerging usage. \u27It argues that the meaningfulness of the term \u27Internet\u27 is now highly compromised and that the specificity it once enjoyed has now become subsumed within a generality equivalent to the notion of \u27the book\u27, or of \u27communication\u27