[Air-l] RE: smal-i Internet - here's the document from the NYT

Denise N. Rall denrall at yahoo.com
Mon Jan 17 18:29:08 PST 2005


1 of 3 DOCUMENTS

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
December 29, 2002 Sunday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 4; Column 1; Week in Review Desk; Pg.
3

LENGTH: 843 words

HEADLINE: The Nation: Case-Sensitive Crusader;
Who Owns the Internet? You and i Do

BYLINE:  By JOHN SCHWARTZ

BODY:

   SOMETHING will be missing when Joseph Turow's book
about families and the Internet is published by M.I.T.
Press next spring: The capital I that usually
begins the word "Internet."

        Mr. Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School
for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania,
studies how people use online technology and how that
affects their lives. He has begun a small crusade to
de-capitalize Internet -- and, by extension, to
acknowledge a deep shift in the way that we think
about the online world.

    "I think what it means is it's part of the
everyday universe," he said.

   Capitalization irked him because, he said, it
seemed to imply that reaching into the vast,
interconnected ether was a brand-name experience.

   "The capitalization of things seems to place an
inordinate, almost private emphasis on something," he
said, turning it into a Kleenex or a Frigidaire. "The
Internet, at least philosophically, should not be
owned by anyone," he said, calling it "part of the
neural universe of life."

   But, he said, dropping the big I would sent a
deeper message to the world: The revolution is over,
and the Net won. It's part of everyone's life, 
and as common as air and water (neither of which
starts with a capital).

   Some elements of the online world have already made
the transition. Internet often appears with a
lowercase I on the Internet itself -- but then, 
spelling online is dreadful, u kno.

   Although most everybody still capitalizes World
Wide Web, words like "website," and the online
journals known as weblogs (or, simply, blogs) are
increasingly lowercase. Of course, the Internet's
capital I is virtually engraved in stone, since
Microsoft Word automatically capitalizes the lowercase
"i" unless a user overrides its settings.

   For Mr. Turow, the first step in his campaign was
persuading his book editor to enlist. She compromised,
dropping to lowercase in newly written 
parts and retaining the capital in older articles
reproduced in the book.

   Then he nudged Steven Jones, a communications
professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and
president of the Association of Internet Researchers. 

Mr. Jones was cool to the idea, until he looked at
copies of Scientific American from the late 19th
century, and noticed that words for new technologies,
like Phonograph, were often uppercased.

   Today, Mr. Jones is a crusader himself.

   "I think the moment is right," he said, to treat
the Internet "the way we refer to television, radio
and the telephone."

   He shared his view with a few hundred close friends
last month at a meeting of the National Communication
Association, an educators' group. "I just noticed
everybody's attention kind of snapped forward," he
said.

   "I'm used to having people say nice things," he
said. "We're scholars, not wrestlers. But this time I
was struck by the number of people who were saying
the equivalent of, 'Right on!' "

   DICTIONARY editors, though, have dismissed Mr.
Turow politely but firmly.

   Dictionaries do not generally see themselves as
making the rules, said Jesse Sheidlower, who runs the
American offices of the Oxford English Dictionary.

   "What dictionaries do is reflect what's out there,"
he said. He and his fellow dictionary editors would
think seriously about such changes after
newspapers make them, he added.

   That could take a while. Allan M. Siegal, a
co-author of The New York Times Manual of Style and
Usage and an assistant managing editor at the 
newspaper, said that "there is some virtue in the
theory" that Internet is becoming a generic term, "and
it would not be surprising to see the lowercase usage
eclipse the uppercase within a few years."

   He said, however, that the newspaper was unlikely
to make any change that was not supported by
authoritative dictionaries.

   Time to ask Robert Kahn, who is as responsible as
anyone for the creation of the Internet, having helped
plan the original network that preceded it 
and having created, with Vinton Cerf, the language of
computer networks, known as TCP/IP, that allowed the
vast knitting-together of systems that gave birth to
the modern medium.

   He cares deeply about the name, having led a fight
for years to ensure that its use is not restricted or
abused by the corporation that received the
trademark in 1989.

   A settlement was reached two years ago with the
company now known as Concord EFS. The company agreed
that it would not dun people who used the word, 
which meant that "Internet" now belongs to everybody,
Mr. Kahn said.

   "We defended the right of people to use the word
'Internet' for what we think of as the Internet," he
said.

   THAT was the important fight, according to Mr.
Kahn. "Whether you use a cap I or little I" hardly
matters, he said.

   Which leads us back to a profound question for Mr.
Turow: Don't you have anything better to do?

   "That's a really interesting question," he said. "I
was an English  major. I'm very sensitive to the
nuances of words, and I'm very concerned about 
the nuances, the feel that words have within the
society."

   Fair enough; Perhaps the next big thing, after all,
will be small. 

At least initially.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

GRAPHIC: Drawing (Stuart Goldenberg)




=====
Denise N. Rall, PhD candidate, School of Environ. Science,
Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 - Mobile 0438 233 344
Sustainable Forestry Mentoring Coordinator & Internet Researcher
Presented! 2004 Conf. Association of Internet Researchers: www.aoir.org
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html



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