The Internet Introduction Introduction

Ever seen The Notebook? If you haven’t, you clearly don't have enough Nic Sparks fans in your life. Assuming that you've seen the greatest romance ever filmed, your standards for romantic partners are a little skewed. After all, if your partner doesn't prove their devotion by jumping onto a moving Ferris wheel to ask you out while ignoring

  • your current date, 
  • the fact that they don’t know you at all,
  • just how close they are to death at that moment,

they probably aren't good enough for you, anyway.

Besides the 1940s setting and the Gosling/McAdams romance (total Swoon City), this plot hinges on one key fact: the internet doesn't exist yet. Sounds ridiculous, we know, but hear us out. The there's a big shift in the story because of some letters (we’d say "spoilers" now but the trailer shows you most of that scene, so…?). Letters can build great friendships and romances, unless all those gushy words get lost somewhere along the way.

Stick with The Notebook for a moment. Imagine that our onscreen lovebirds didn’t have their big romance-movie-level misunderstanding because of a glitch in the mail. Better yet, imagine the whole movie scooped itself into a time machine (maybe Sparks teamed up with Audrey Niffenegger) and stepped out in the present.

1940s Noah and Allie might have made it work with letters, but nowadays they may go for something a little faster. Maybe they send email, chat over Skype, or follow each other on Twitter. Since they live pretty close, they might want to meet up for a Netflix marathon of their favorite show. If they want to take a romantic trip outside of Seabrook Island, South Carolina, they probably have to sift through some bus schedules, find the best airfare, or at least get some driving directions.

Where can they do all of this? The internet.

The internet—from Tumblr and TV Tropes to Timehop and Twitch—works a lot like the postal service. It allows us to ship things and ideas around the world without losing anything in the process.

(Unless that steamy love letter gets filtered as spam, of course.)

A lot happens between when you drop your love letter at the post office and when it arrives in your sweetheart’s mailbox. In the same way, plenty went down before this web page popped up on your screen—even if computers tend to be faster than U.S. bureaucracies.

The internet doesn’t just float magically somewhere in the sky and rain down knowledge when asked, or whisk paperless love letters between unstuck-in-time Noah and Allie. It's a real thing with real parts and if it ever really gets broken, we're in real trouble.

Let’s do it, let's fall in love …with the internet.

 

Why Should I Care?

Whether you’ve received a birthday card from a relative, ordered a book that was out of stock at the local bookstore, or sent someone a brick for funzies, you’ve probably used the mail at some point. And you’ve almost definitely used the internet for something.

Hint, hint: you're on it right now.

The internet sends you things much faster than even the best mail service (sorry Prime Now), but it does more than drop a nice brick at your doorstep. This enigmatic piece of technology is at the very center of communication, education, and entertainment—and you take the fact that it works for granted. Every day.

Thanks to some brilliant minds, countless computers, miles upon miles of cable, and a few other parts, you can now find basically anything you ever want or need to know in seconds. Research becomes a whole lot faster when you have several academic databases handy. False reports can be easily discredited when you can spread breaking news from the scene itself. And you certainly couldn’t Shmoop it up in the 40s.

Ain’t that a pity?

The internet opens up infinite possibilities for learning, creating, and sharing. It’s an information superhighway and it's too important to the current world for you to not know how it works.