[Air-l] Internet as medium with different sub-media or channels?

[elw at stderr.org]

>> media, as Anders suggests.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that 
>> the internet taken broadly shouldn't be considered as a medium at all, 
>> but a domain or infrastructure for various media.  But as
>
> Thanks Christopher for stating the obvious. The internet IS the 
> infrastructure and other things happen on it. The packet could care 
> less. Its 'purpose in life' is to get from point A to point B, 
> preferably without colliding with any other packet (if it does, ethernet 
> constraints tell it what to do). It carries data not messages.  The 
> messages, etc. are coded at one end and decoded at the other end. The 
> internet is not a media! although I can see how it carries that burden 
> today. People are still confounding the internet with the WWW. The web 
> has expressive elements, the internet does not.


there are certainly a lot of layers to this.

some packets [s/packets/communicative acts] are, by their very existence, 
messages.  (e.g., ping packets or ICMP packets or syn/ack packets...)

is an IM "presence" indicator a message?  the jabber folks sure think 
so...

from the technorhetorician/jargonaut end of things, some packets are more 
data-oriented than others.  e.g., streaming protocols, etc.  but even 
those have session setup/teardown 'messages' that are sent - often in just 
a packet or two.

intuitively connected frames I'm thinking of:

Shannon/Weaver
Peirce
Stanley Fish (reader-response theory...)
McLuhan

anybody else got a paradigm in mind that they think relates this stuff?


I might argue that even saying that the "web" has expressive elements that 
the "internet" does not is a little bogus.  What sort of "web" experience 
are we talking about, and what technologies are fundamental to being "web" 
enabled?  (i.e., what if there's no html?  what if the whole thing is a 
Flash .swf file that just happened to be transmitted over HTTP?  What if 
I've tunneled HTTP through DNS packets, or an SSH tunnel, or some other 
geek stunt?  Is that still the web?  Or is it something other, something 
that we have to think about the boundaries and parameters of?

What if I use the same technologies for something COMPLETELY unlike what 
we 'typically' use the w3 for now?  Am I "web", or am I just an 
anachronistic transmission of data blobs from port to port?

what delineates 'web' from 'internet' from 'intarnetwebcom' (in my 
brother's jargon)?



this is becoming a Hard conversation :)


--elijah