I was sitting in a room that was teaching novices How To Use The Internet.  It befuddled me a bit — the instructions were perfectly superfluous and only served to mystify the Internet where the point of thic class, it seemed to me, was breeding familiarity to a group of tech non-savvy people.  The instructor reached back and bore through the Internet as being developed by the Pentagon for the purpose of sharing information between, breaking the word “Internet” into “inter” meaning “between” and “network” meaning “network”.

We went through that phase as a culture in the 1990s.  But it was superfluous then as well.

I saw somewhere a reference mocking Senator Ted Stevens’s “Series of Tubes” comment in explaining the Internet in his debate on Net Neutrality as his misplaced role sitting on a Senate committee on decisions that affect the Internet.  It struck me that this comment has replaced the Bush debate comment about the rumours “all over the Internets” — that’s plural in case you missed it.  I’m not entirely sure that the Internet isn’t a series of tubes, or can be conceptualized as such, which would put him ahead of Bush in this category.  Nonetheless, a year ago the derisive comment would hit Bush’s “Internets” comment and not Stevens’s “Tubes” comment.  I wonder if a year from now who will make the next comment of that type…

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