{"id":2677,"date":"2011-10-13T12:35:31","date_gmt":"2011-10-13T16:35:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/?p=2677"},"modified":"2021-10-19T06:48:29","modified_gmt":"2021-10-19T10:48:29","slug":"relax-its-only-a-splinter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/relax-its-only-a-splinter\/","title":{"rendered":"Relax. It’s only a Splinter."},"content":{"rendered":"

In its short life, the internet has gone through a number of geological ages.\u00a0 Terms like \u201cNet 2.0\u201d have been coined to place markers on these transition points.\u00a0 Another one is starting to make its rounds, and unlike most of its predecessors it is coined more from a sense of foreboding than hope.\u00a0 The new term is \u201csplinternet<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The concern expressed by the term is this: that the internet’s development is so multi-directional, not only in terms of the types of software and coding standards used, but in the development of physical technologies that interface with them, that the internet is going to essentially \u201cbreak apart.\u201d\u00a0 Instead of being a cohesive whole, the internet is going to \u201csplinter\u201d into small islands that can only easily communicate with each other, goes the theory.<\/p>\n

Sounds like scary stuff, doesn’t it?\u00a0 It might be if it were grounded in a rational worry.\u00a0 It is not.<\/p>\n

Break the word down<\/strong><\/p>\n

One way to make the case that this isn’t a problem is to look at the word itself.\u00a0 \u201cSplinternet\u201d is actually a generalized term to refer to a number of changes that affect only part of the internet.\u00a0 This may make them seem similar enough to describe with a single term, but like the word \u201csanction,\u201d which has come to mean essentially opposite things (to allow and to penalize), these changes actually cancel each other out.\u00a0 In doing so, they reveal the concept’s underlying contradiction.<\/p>\n

The first of these changes we’ve discussed here at length: that is the proliferation of different, for lack of a better term, \u201cspeakers\u201d and \u201clisteners\u201d (broader, a bit than \u201coutput\u201d and \u201cinput\u201d).\u00a0 The \u201cspeakers\u201d can be referred to as anything which is part of the process of creating and transmitting the data.\u00a0 This would include operating systems at all levels, data encoders and anything which sends this data out, like a video camera.\u00a0 \u201cListeners\u201d would include anything which accepts the data and does something with it.\u00a0 This would include web browsers or any similar data translating environment, and just about all hardware.\u00a0 Most software would probably fit into both categories.<\/p>\n

The fear, in a nutshell, is that companies are moving towards making speakers and listeners that only understand each other, forcing customers into little pocket islands of communication.\u00a0 The response, in a nutshell, is that this is an absurd worry.<\/p>\n

There will never be a single standard.\u00a0 And that’s good.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This fear is refuted by the fact that this worry has existed already for decades and has never come to fruition.\u00a0 Apple and Microsoft, two of the biggest offenders in this category, are famous for trotting out new standards that don’t play well with others.\u00a0 Sometimes these developments do successfully push users to them.\u00a0 Other times they push users to create things like Linux.\u00a0 Still other times, they push users to create things on Linux that work with Windows.\u00a0 No company has ever had success at making the entire internet bend exactly to their will on a whim.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the very problem that we are complaining about we are also helping to create.\u00a0 If you create \u201cstandards,\u201d then by their nature you run the risk of giving inordinate power to whoever is responsible for maintaining them.\u00a0 One commentator addressing this problem noted that \u201cGoogle works because it is standardized.\u201d\u00a0 Well, not everyone wants Google to find them, something we’ll discuss more in a second.<\/p>\n

You can’t complain on one hand that companies like Microsoft have too much power, and then on the other that Google doesn’t have enough.\u00a0 Insisting on standards means that you are eventually going to have a single authority in control of them.\u00a0 Single authorities are not what the internet is about.<\/p>\n

This brings us to the second definition of the word.<\/p>\n

More than one way to skin a Splinter
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

The other definition of the term refers to a more traditional problem: that of countries imposing their own restrictions on the internet, usually to keep out disallowed content.\u00a0 As an example, Wikipedia reports that \u201cdigital content available to U.K. citizens via the BBC’s iPlayer<\/a> is ‘increasingly unavailable to Germans.'”\u00a0\u00a0 I’ll pause for a second to give you a moment to discover the flaw you get when you put this problem together with the previous one.<\/p>\n

Answer: make another player.\u00a0 If you are in Germany, and you want something that you can’t get through iPlayer, there are other media streamers.\u00a0 The web has \u201csplintered\u201d, you see.\u00a0 In fact, Wikipedia also reports that \u201cmany people outside the UK circumvent that rule by buying a virtual private network account with an IP address located in the UK.\u201d\u00a0 I have a friend who moved to China who said that he’s able to regularly jump over the Great Firewall.<\/p>\n

There’s also a flip side to this that if we thought for a second about, we would quietly cheer.\u00a0 One of the \u201cproblems\u201d that has been mentioned in association with this splintering is that marketers are going to have a much harder time figuring out how to play the system to get maximum bang for their buck.\u00a0 As one who remembers the internet pre-advertising, I have to ask how bad this is.\u00a0 For those of you small businesses out there, it doesn’t mean that advertising will become impossible.\u00a0 It will just mean that you’ll have to put thought into who you reach, and how.\u00a0 Again, this is a bad thing?<\/p>\n

We choose standards.\u00a0 They don’t choose us.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The premises behind the worries about the \u201csplinternet\u201d are simply flawed.\u00a0 The inability of the internet to come up with a single set of rules that every last person plays by is its beauty.\u00a0 No one ever guaranteed that everything on the internet would be equally available and equally accessible to all people at all times by all methods.\u00a0 In fact, by definition of the internet’s construct, it’s impossible.<\/p>\n

Ways of being on the internet have come and gone, and will continue to do so.\u00a0 A long view of it has shown that every problem spawned a solution, even if sometimes it took all of a year or two.\u00a0 The strength of the internet isn’t that we’re all the same.\u00a0 It is that we’re all different, but we’re all connected by a web, which we can come and go from as we please<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In its short life, the internet has gone through a number of geological ages.\u00a0 Terms like \u201cNet 2.0\u201d have been coined to place markers on these transition points.\u00a0 Another one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3098,3099],"class_list":["post-2677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-stuff","tag-net-2-0","tag-splinternet"],"views":88,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}