I am old enough to remember when we had trouble explaining the Internet. It was 1994 or 1995, and everyone was talking about America Online. When telling someone a web address, people would say, “Go to h, t, t, p, colon, slash, slash, w, w, w, dot.” People didn’t even know how to pronounce @ or explain the Internet.
To explain the Internet, we’d use metaphors and analogies. It’s like TV, kind of. It’s like a printing press for everyone. A computer billboard. Electronic mail. It’s one to one and one to many and many to many, unlike TV which is one to many and phone which is one to one.
For the past few years, the Internet is so embedded that we now use even websites as metaphors for other websites: “it’s like Uber, for food,” “it’s like Airbnb, for dogs.” Even our understanding of the brain’s neuron networks seems to borrow heavily from a metaphor to computer networks. Essentially, it’s so familiar that we intuitively understand it, and have to make sense of new things by reference to the old and familiar–the Internet.
Marvin Ammori 