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It's Just the 'internet' Now?
This morning Wired News announced that 'web', 'net', and 'internet' will no longer be capitalized in their stories. Is this the next logical step after ditching 'e-mail' in favor of 'email' , or should the global computer network still be treated with a proper name? For more discussion, see Wikipedia, The Chicago Manual, and an article profiling Joseph Turow's de-capitalization efforts.
people stop writing WEB when it's not an acronym or abbreviation.
I see the Internet as a place, like Amsterdam or Mars.
A proper name of place is capitalized, hence i capitalize the Internet accordingly.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
(a) Nobody cares. Nobody, most of all Wired (which tries to coin terms and screw with the language unsuccessfully on a very frequent basis) has the ability to just decree that everyone is going to change capitalization or spelling of a word. The includes dictionaries -- they just codify common usage.
(b) Insofar as there is a correct way of doing things, "Internet" should be capitalized. We use "the Internet". It is a proper noun (which, surprise surprise, should be capitalized) that refers to something quite different from "an internet" -- I can build "an internet" running IPX attaching a couple of networks, but "the Internet" runs IP and is a rather large entity that currently spans the world.
(c) I hate journalists that try to leave their mark on the world by affecting the language.
(d) Tell you what. I think that there's "no reason to capitalize 'Wired'" -- after all, there's another term, "wired", which exists, and surely we should just merge the two. So from now on, "Wired" can be referred to as "wired". Of course, the newly-redubbed "wired" people will probably take issue with this, as it's confusing and doesn't gain anything, and violates English rules, but I want to get my name out there on etymologies for mucking with a word. It's "wired" now. Oh, and "Tony Long", the editor pushing this? He can be "tony long", or just "long" for short.
May we never see th
"The Internet" is the NAME of a single computer network. There are other networks with names, like Fidonet, Bitnet, Arpanet, etc, but most of them are not around anymore. Saying that it is no more a proper noun than car, refrigerator, or restaurant is simply wrong.
If you had named your fridge "Old Whiny", your car "Betty", and your restaurant was named "The E-Coli Farm" it WOULD be correct to say:
"Old Whiny is broken and the food is bad, so let's jump in Betty and go to The E-Coli Farm." (I skipped the food because few people name individual items of food.)
That the The Internet happens to be a name in definite form does not make it any less of a name, just like The Netherlands is still the name of a country, and The Rocky Mountains is still the name of a mountain chain. (Note that "a rocky mountain" is something entirely different - just like "an internet.")
A collection of machines that can talk directly to each other over a common link layer (like ethernet) is a network. A network may use IP for convenience, but if everyone's using the same subnet, its just a simple network. (Calling it an intranet may be correct, but it's not very informative (unless you're talking about administrative domains), since an intranet could be a network or an internetwork.)
A collection of interconnected networks that communicate using a common link-layer independant internetworking protocol (like IP) is an internet (regardless of whether it is connected to the Internet).
The Internet is the largest connected internet.
-jim