If you have been living under a rock for the last two decades, this article is for you. Sadly, the title contains words that would most probably mean nothing to you. To you these may be just some kind of gibberish kids make up every now and then. Kids like doing that. Kinda like when the hippies back in the 60s made up new words and all. Now, a new set of lingo has emersed. When they say they want to "google" something, you may probably understand it as someone being lazy about something. When they say they want you to "facebook" them, you’d probably end up throwing a phonebook in their face and end up in jail.
To avoid such misfortune and in order to hide the fact that you have been living under a rock for the past 20 years, you must understand the thing that changed humanity as we all know it. And that thing is called The Internet.
What is the Internet? Nobody fully knows what the Internet is. People from all walks of life give their own definitions of this thing and yet, nobody seems to have been able to come up with the jackpot answer. Sociologists call it, the thing that will define the lifestyle of modern man. Some theologians and members of the religious order call it a tool of the devil. Businessmen call it the new primary marketing tool. I will talk more about how people from different walks of life define the Internet in the upcoming posts. Right now, I should stop digressing and start talking about my main topic. Sorry about that.
The Internet is a series of interconnected networks (hence, the network of networks) that can be accessed by anyone who has a computer and a decent internet service provider. It’s like a library-museum-mall-office where you can view, read and know about different kinds of information. Only this time, the whole world is contributing to it. Using your computer, you can view different pages of information about almost anything conceived by mankind. These pages run up to tens of billions. Maybe even more. The tool you use in your computer in order to access these pages are called, a browser. Today, the most popular browsers are the Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. You can browse the Internet for the latest local and global news (and gossip), view pictures of your friends from the North Pole or listen to Beethoven while learning the recipe for Lasagne alla Ricotta. You can also shop for the latest bargains, plan your vacation to Hawaii and download your favorite movies starred by audrey Hepburn. When you are connected to the Internet, you are said to be "online". And because you are reading this article, yes, you are online. Yay!
The pages you view are called websites. There are different kids of websites. There are blogs (online journals), company sites, e-shops, social network sites, forums, gaming, news sites, etc. Most of these sites showcase a particular service to make their online presence well felt. For example, a website called Yahoo offers free online mailing service. Yahoo allows you to have an email address so you can send and receive emails. Email is short for electronic mail, or sending mail via the Internet. Gone are the days when you had to write and re-write hundreds of solicitation letters asking friends to lend you their club and cudgel and walk 23 miles to the nearest postbox.
The Internet started out more than 30 years ago as a medium to exchange information between two computers. Today, the Internet is used for all sorts of things: sharing pictures, watching movies, listening to music, buying groceries, reading e-books, etc. Communication has never been this easy. The era that we live in is called Information Age precisely because we live in a world where society is run by information and highly "dominated" by the technology that handles it. Nowadays, information could be passed on quickly and efficiently that you can directly access it wherever you are in the world. In a sense, the Internet has changed the world, and humanity along with it.
I know this spiel is far from defining what the Internet is. The Internet is something you experience rather than study. In the next posts, I will be talking about the fundamentals of the Internet and the anatomy of the website.
