Last week I had a special edition about SOPA, which mainly affects the Internet. Now, that was a by-popular-demand topic, but I thought we should start small for those of us who aren't so tech savvy. After all, it's hard to care about the politics involved with a topic if you don't understand the topic, right?
The word "internet" basically means "interconnected networks", but that doesn't really help too much does it? The way I usually explain the Internet to people is by visualization. You know me. I know my mother. My mother knows her friend Debbie. Debbie knows her mechanic Bob.We've now drawn a line from you to a car mechanic in South Florida. Now, let's say that instead of each of us knowing just one person, we know all the people we actually know, including coworkers, old classmates, neighbors, family, friends, etc. There's probably a lot of overlap of people-who-know-people-we-both-know now. We often know so many people we often classify them as our different "networks" of people, right?
The Internet is very much like that visualization. It's a collection of computers and computers-linked-to-computers (aka networks) that spans over the entire world- not so different than the telephone lines we're all familiar with. The only difference is that instead of carrying just audio, the internet can carrying those magical ones and zeros we talked about before that can turn into pictures, videos, audio, pages on a screen or anything else. It's a bit overwhelming, isn't it?
Practical Tip of the Day:
The icon you click on to get to the Internet is called your "web browser". There are lots of different web browsers out there, and while they all do the same basic thing, they all do it a little differently- just like different models of cars. So if someone ever asks what web browser (or sometimes simply called "browser") you use, you can now look at the icon and know exactly what they're talking about!
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