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.

I am a philosopher.  Now, the way that philosophers like to approach problems like this one is by way of the time-honored game of… giving a definition.  So with respect to the internet we look for a definition by asking: What is the internet?

So, what is the internet?  In this case, at least, this is altogether the wrong question to ask.   The internet is not a thing.  It is not a medium, new or old, it is not just some ‘new media’.  The internet, moreover, is not itself just a multimedia process.  It does not just bring together text, and video, and audio, or sound and light and word.  The internet is not a thing that can be defined, not a medium whose essence can be distilled.

The internet is not a thing.  It is a process.  It is a practice.  Or rather an intersection of a great many processes and practices.  It is a flexible protocol for reflexively working on, remixing, reusing, re-doing, re-synthesizing our media and our selves.

The internet is not a thing.  You can not just point at all the cables and routers and fiber-optic material strewn across the planet and laid across the ocean floors.  What makes all that stuff work are the practical processes by which we make use of all those cables, which are otherwise about as good as junk.  The internet is not something you can point at, not something you can define, not something whose essence you can grasp.

The internet, on the contrary, is only something that you can do.  But that sounds strange so let me give you another word for it.  Let’s stop talking about ‘the internet‘ as if it is a thing and start talking about ‘internetworking‘ in order to suggest that this is something that we do in the sense of a kind of work that we all perform.  Internetworking is our working together, a network of our networks, which net together our disparate works.

So, like a true philosopher, let me leave you not with an answer but only with a question or a set of questions to which I would not pretend to give an answer.  At least not yet.  Those questions are: “What is internetworking?  What internetworks?  How does internetworking work?”  It seems to me that we do not yet have the concepts to answer these questions.  So it is our job to make these concepts by better understanding how our work works.