The Internet is Magic!

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I know very little about how the Internet operates. Like the girl in this video (http://technology.todaysbigthing.com/2008/11/20) and her assumed fictional audience, I am one of many who relegate my on-line experience to a mysterious structure, greater than I am, and amazingly complicated. Unlike the girl in the video, I am not trying to sell you my home Internet business. I am trying to orient my experience within a digital lifeworld that I inhabit daily, yet one in which I am not native. The ephemerality of its architecture makes the most sense to me in the context of B. Carpenter’s metaphor of a river in the on-line essay “Internet Architecture” (http://technology.todaysbigthing.com/2008/11/20. Originally published in Architectural Principles of the Internet, June, 1996). Because of its gigantic scale, the Internet “introduces new phenomena: the number of packets flowing through the switches on the backbone is so large that it exhibits the kind of complex non-linear patterns usually found in natural, analog systems like the flow of water…” Perhaps this is why water metaphors are used throughout the language of the Net in concepts such as “surfing” and “navigation”—because we phenomenologically experience this “stream” of data whether or not we can fully comprehend it.