I Am the Interwebz

I’m currently reading Clay Shirkey’s Cognitive Surplus (which is really good, by the way), and this morning it struck me that I now think about the internet in the same way that I have been thinking about books since about 1968: that is, not at all. 

‘Not at all’, in the sense of not thinking about their physical structure; not thinking about the carrier signals/layers (paper, ink, language, the alphabet; wires, networks, data packets, electrons); and de-centring them in the mind such that only the content is of importance - all the rest is invisible.

This seems more explicable to me in terms of books, because when I was learning to read I was not old enough to be conscious of the act of learning, nor of the different conceptual frameworks were  in play: I was just doing what I was told to do - writing those letter shapes over and over - and my pre-programmed sub-conscious brain and its plastic wiring were doing all the work to make it all fit together (well done, evolution). 

With the interwebz, however, things were different: the publicly-accessible development of the hardware infrastructure and the software overlays all took place during my adult life, when I was professionally or casually involved (more or less) in activities that revolved around computing. I’m pretty sure that I used to pretty much understand how this all worked. Now I don’t really have much of a clue. 

This makes me sad. Need to find a primer.