The Internet

The modern internet is relatively young. I write modern because the internet has since its inception in the late 50's/early 60's evolved a lot. It started in the hands of a few individuals, got into the hands of the government, then moved on to different computer universities, moved to the professional basis, refined itself in the hands of the military, got sponsored and basic ruleset layed out by National Science Foundation, was further refined by different educational facilities and CERN, before becoming more commercialized, later expanding gradually to the public, hitting those interested in computer technology first, before moving on to the general public.

The problem is, as the internet first was used by people who can be considered ''common public'' in the late 90's, and the curve over who used it could closest be described as exponential, most webpages aren't actually very old. Very few websites can brag about being anything older than 10 years, but despite this, most domain names have been claimed. This basically means that the internet, as young, yet important to modern life as it is, is looking at being filled extremely quickly, where all domain names are looking at being taken by relatively short time. This basically means that no webpage can be created without destroying the one that is already existing, when this happens.

If you're having problems with accepting this, it's easy to prove it. Most good websites have within 10 letters in their domain names. And while the amount of combinations of letters in a website name are many, they are limited to a finite number of variations based on the ASCII system, where few of the combinations are actually usable. It's like if you have a big bowl of metaphorical sandwich pieces, and every combination can only be claimed by one person. The problem is that there's not an eternal number of ingredients, and more and more people have found out about the nom-ability of all the sandwiches, so they all wanted one. The combinations are running out, and fewer and fewer sandwiches taste any good.

Metaphors based on food. I think I might be hungry.

But the internet being filled up is just one problem. Another problem is that the internet is being abused by everyone. Whether it's corporations trying to commercialize and claim the internet, professionals and hobbyists trying to ''improve'' it in each their own way, and amateurs who are rambling about without knowing what they try to do, or how they are supposed to do it. The web is enormous, and everyone have their own ideas of how it is and should be, and act accordingly.This leads to the aforemented, though relative, abuse, where nobody agree on what to do (except for the standards set by the W3C), and keep on moving the internet in different directions.

The internet is in this way pulled in different directions at the same time, leading to more and more complexity and chaos. While the internet has actually gotten less complex to use, it's become harder to understand. To take an example, there's all kinds of social groups conflicting with each other, and if you say one thing that supports either one of them, you're going to get some reactions against you, and discussions about why you suck for believing just that. You have to know everything about the sosiology, anthropology, norms, customs, etc. about a site before actually being able to do anything on your own there.

Whether it's asking a forum a question, posting a funny picture on a funny picture site, or even just leaving a comment on anything at all posted online, there's always a social environment with their own customs and opinions who will react in different ways at the exact same actions. Some will even do things as simple as banning you for preferring regular milk to chocolate milk. They don't care if you may have allergies, or even if you have some kind of chocolate-related trauma, they will act the way the rest of their social group does. With negativity towards anything that's different or disliked.

What, you thought I was kidding?

But it's not that odd that they react to different things, the reason for the being there is after all that they have an idea of what to expect, and if anyone try to change it, they'll oppose them as a defence mechanism against someone trying to break something they like.

The internet is huge and complicated, and even though I've written a lot right now about its history and culture, it's an incredible amount more that I can't possibly cover. The internet is a massive source of information, and more and more just keeps getting added, making it impossible to cover it all, at least for more than the second it takes to add more information. The internet is currently as I'm writing this at the a size of over 7.43 billion sites. Each of them have a differenct culture associated with it, and unless you have no opinions at all, you're going to collide with some of them.