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A Succinct Definition of the Internet?
magnamous asks: "Ever since Senator Ted Stevens used the phrase 'series of tubes' to describe his understanding of the Internet, I've noticed several stories and comments referencing how silly that is. Although I agree that that description is rather silly, each time I've found myself trying to come up with a -succinct layman's definition- of what the Internet is, and I come up short. Wikipedia has a gargantuan page describing the Internet, and Google's definitions offer pretty good descriptions of what the Internet is in a functional sense (with some throwing in terms that the layman wouldn't understand, or take the time to understand), but not really a good description of what it -is- in the physical sense that I think Sen. Stevens was trying to get at. What are your suggestions for a succinct layman's definition of the Internet?"
I know some would say that laypeople should take the time to learn the technical, more accurate meaning of what the Internet is. The problem is that they won't. We all know laypeople. I live with two of them. When you start talking about 'TCP/IP' or 'DNS', or if you get far enough to start describing those terms, their eyes glaze over. That's what makes them laypeople — they don't care about the subject enough to learn about it in-depth; if they did, they'd be computer enthusiasts. So please keep in mind that, in order for this discussion to be useful, 'succinct' and 'layman' are essential parts to any definition of the Internet given here. Also keep in mind that 'succinct' doesn't necessarily mean one sentence; a relatively short paragraph would be fine, too — the main goal is to come up with something that physically describes the Internet in a way which laypeople can actually understand."
The internet is a collection of ideas, presented to users in a vast array of increasingly easier to use methods, by a plethora of individuals, groups, small businesses, corporations and governments, for multiple purposes involving money, fact and/or opinion. No single group of aligned parties shall control the Internet, or the Internet shall be no longer valid.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
How about "bunch of computers connected using phone lines"?
Maybe just call it "series of tubes"? Stevens is pretty layman, so I wouldn't be surprised most people can understand better with description like that.
We used to call aeroplanes "big metal birds" and people instantly associate it with "big flying things" in a physical sense. Later on, aeroplane becomes a common term and no more layman terms are needed.
So in the future the term "internet" would be enough for everyone, but right now, "series of tubes" pretty much describes its physical structure.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
It's pretty much a telephone system, except that it's computers calling other computers. Most people have a basic understanding of the workings -- if not the mechanics -- of a phone system.
licet differant, aequabitur
I thougth the "tubes" analogy was fine, myself. I don't know why people got on his case about it.
Usually when i try to describe the internet I liken it to the mail system. You have "envelopes" that are addressed to someplace. Then they get picked up by someone, thrown on a truck, routed etc. It's basically the same thing that happens with packets as they get routed.
As far as the WWW goes, that's a different and distinct thing that's built on top of the Internet. I don't think it's really that hard to explain. It's just like a library or newspaper basically.
If you want to get into the finer social implications.. then that's another story, but the basics, I think, are easily understood in terms of familiar concepts.
So when you come up with a good definition, please contribute and edit the Simple English page.
Physical: The Internet is a collection of computers that send each other messages, along with the equipment that carries the messages. Social: The Internet is a virtual community where people can get together, do business, and share ideas and culture. Functional: The Internet is a way you can use computers to send family, friends, and co-workers letters, pictures, and movies. Technical: The Internet is a collection of computers following protocols conforming to the OSI model that enable computers to communicate with each other. ...
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
That's a really good definition. You are right that the key observation is that the technological means by which all of the computers are connected and the protocols they use are not important.
However since we are defining The Internet and not merely any computer network (to which your definition would apply), you should mention that this is a globally connected public system.
The enemies of Democracy are
I know people joke about the series of tubes thing, but it seems to me that was the least wrong part of Stevens' totally confused statement.
Politics aside, I don't really see the technical problem with comparing the Internet to a series of tubes. Tubes have a predictable bandwidth, i.e. you can only pump a certain amount of liquid or gas through them in a given time; and they have predictable latency, i.e. you push something in one end, it takes some time to come out the other end. So far, a lot like a network connection.
What the "series of tubes" doesn't capture is the packetized nature of the internet, or the complexities of routing, and other such details. However, at the abstraction level at which Stevens was talking, I'm not sure any of that matters. If you're talking about things like "clogging up the Internet", it's true that that can happen, for the same reasons that tubes can get clogged: if you try to put too much stuff in, at too many entry points, your backbone tubes are going to become a bottleneck. So the metaphor holds up in this case, and predicts behavior that you can see on actual networks.
The fact that the email problem Stevens was describing had nothing to do with Internet congestion is a separate issue, which doesn't actually detract from "series of tubes" as a metaphor for the Internet at a certain level of abstraction.
I'd love to hear reasons why I'm wrong. Other than "Ignore the facts, we must excoriate politicians who are against network neutrality!" Ridiculing a perfectly good metaphor just because you don't agree with the guy using it is not the way to sensible public policy, although I admit it does seem to be how politics is often conducted.
A friend of mine managed to cover this in four words over a decade ago:
"Many computers--all friends."
I agree. The problem here is that the Internet is close to being irreducible in it's complexity, and thus any simplifying metaphor will have to ignore a huge chunk of what's going on. There is simply nothing that people know that is both sufficiently common and sufficiently similar to really work as an analogy.
The the metaphors must be tailored to the aspect you want to describe, and in the sense that bandwidth is a limited resource, clogged tubes sort of work. A network of roads with trucks on them trucks works well too.
(Of course, we know that both these analogies are stupid, because it's really a matter of opening and closing circuits to replicate bit states etc. Ergo, nothing really *moves* anywhere.)
Having said that though, I think he sounds stupid most because of *how* he says it. It's clear that he doesn't understand his own analogy and the limits of it's validity. The analogy itself is ok though.
> I don't know why people got on his case about it.
Because of the rest of the description wherein he believed that other people downloading movies somewhere were clogging the pipes and kept his "internet" (email) from arriving on time. If you watch it in context, it's clear that he doesn't know how the internet works. As far as anyone can tell, he believed the pipes are, well, literal pipes with "internets" flowing through them. Did you ever see the full speech? Only the first line gets widely quoted any more, but the Daily Show showed the whole thing. It was ridiculous.
Anyhow, the most succinct definition of "internet" I can give you is just one word: here.
Or if you need something with more technical accuracy, it's the giant network computers get connected to because almost everyone else is also connected to it. All the internet providers link to other providers, who eventually link with everyone else, because there's not much value in having a network isolated from the rest of the world in most cases.
The Internet is a set of sophisticated protocols and connections allowing any 'connected' computer or appliance to communicate.
The World Wide Web (Web) is an array of services available on the Internet, allowing individuals, groups, corporations and governments to read, publish, buy or sell - to or from - broad or narrow audiences.
But the Internet is more than just the Web - it allows a wide array of services and products to communicate, from email to machine to machine reporting and control, to new forms of telephony and new kinds of software that 'feels local', but isn't. The only constant of the Internet is change, and the largest threats to the Internet are from entities that want to slow or halt progress or the free exchange of ideas.
You know. The establishment. Entrenched power, whether religious, political or corporate.
The Internet represents change, for good or ill.
And that's why we still have spam, because SMTP thinks all computers are our friends.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
The Internet is no single piece of technology. It is an agreement about how to have different networks and technologies talk to each other and work together.
It's a bit heady, maybe even a bit airy-fairy, but the essay captures some of the essence of why the Internet is different and proves to be so valuable.
I also think it's a good lead in for discussing why net neutrality is essential. A non-neutral policy essentially throws away the agreement, likely fracturing the network into pieces between which there'd be ongoing maybe-we'll-talk-maybe-we-won't negotiations. Pieces get balkanized, even walled off, and resources that used to go to developing services that anyone who was part of the agreement could use now have to be devoted to the negotiation.
With the Internet agreement, you don't have to concentrate on that. Just follow the guidelines on how to talk to one edge of the net, and you can talk to the whole world. That's the revolution.
Tweet, tweet.
IN fact that's where the terminology game from. Why do you think a bunch of data is called a packet? Its cause packets are what you send through the mail, at least in the 50's thats what they were called (nowadays everyting is a "package" but that's more because the term "packet" is now more widely used electronically.
If you want to explain the internet to people, use the analogies that the original terms were modeled after!
Server - A server is like a waiter or customer service person. You ask it for something and get get sir for you. The ony difference is the server is a computer that is handling the requests.
Client - A client is like a patron or business client; he is the person asking the server for things. In the case of the internet the client is another computer, who is asking the server for something.
Packet - A bundle of information, with an address, that needs to be delivered. The packet could be going from the client to the server, in which case it is how the client is asking the server for something. If it is going from the server to the client, it is the information the server asked for.
Server, Client, Packet. Three simple words any layperson SHOULD ALREADY KNOW. It's not really hard to explain.
Does the internet exist if nobody is connected?
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
It displays an amazing ignorance of the scale and nature of the Internet. He is almost certainly not waiting to receive a 10 megabyte email, so the other traffic on the Internet is essentially meaningless. My ping times to anywhere in the world are never above 1 second (except to dialup users), which means that email will not be delayed much longer than the time it takes to transmit it with available bandwidth. There is no "filled" tube for a message to get in line behind, only a great number of packets of roughly the same size with equal priority. The real reason his email took longer to arrive than expected was probably because of busy spam/virus/censorship/echelon filters and spam-clogged email servers.
In fact, he Internet *is* something to just dump things on. It is designed to work that way because it's a packet switched network. It's not like a highway where mac trucks block traffic; the mac trucks and cars get cut up into equal size packets and the packets all go the same speed. The mac trucks still take longer to get where they're going, but none of the cars ever have to wait behind them. At worst, the roads just get too crowded and bandwidth has to be increased.
That's how I tried to explained the internet to my mother. Each Computer has a telephone number (= IP number), which can be used by computers to call one or more other computers (single call, conference call). WWW is just a way how they talk to one another, when they are connected. Surely not more correct than the series of tubes, but it was good enough for her.
For people immersed in an IT culture, what the Internet "is" and "how it works" are no-brainers. But there's a trap of expertise in that it does not cross cultural boundaries, as communications between the technology "haves" and "have-nots" tends to atrophy and eventually the "other group" isn't recognised at all. Here's a sample meme:
"If all you have is a hammer, then it's generally a bad idea to adjust your BIOS settings".
I can understand that meme, you can understand that meme -- here's a test, can you imagine anyone who wouldn't get that meme? Yet the first part is local to an engineering aphorism and the second is pure desktop technology. Yet the meaning is immediately familiar to us. So familiar, in fact, that one cannot possibly imagine how anybody today could not "get" it. Yet how many people from, say, the class of people with only a small grocery store background, or a background in politics or fashion management or timber industry would know what a BIOS was if it bit them in the clock?
Those in the know are often unaware just how eye-glazing our conversation can be to those who don't. And trust me, there are a lot in the latter camp. A lot in the latter camp.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear