How does internetworking work? (Talk at Metaphi.)

This is for a little (2-minute!) talk I am giving tonight at Metaphi: <http://metamedia.uoregon.edu/metaphi/>.

What are media?  What is a medium?  We hear a lot these days about new media, old media, broadcast media, collaborative media, social media, civic media, and all other kinds of new-and-exciting media.  At the center of all this hubbub is the hub of hubs, that thing that we all call the internet.  But is that all that the internet is?  Is it just some new medium or new media?

What is the internet?  This seems like an easy question.  But it’s not.  Nobody in this room, given an hour of time, could craft a definition that would satisfy most of the other people in the room.  My sense is that we do not even yet have a concept for the thing that we call the internet, namely that thing we all use on a daily basis to send our flurries of emails, publish our articles, read the Times, and watch all those funny but exasparatingly innane YouTube memes.