Though it may be surprising to some of us, with our smart phones, tablets, and 24 hour a day access to the internet, there are some people who still know absolutely nothing about the internet.
Those of us with the world wide web hooked up to us intravenously sometimes forget that there are other things in the world. It baffles us that anyone would need a definition for things like wikipedia, twitter, or a blog.
The first time I tried to explain the internet’s most used encyclopedia to my grandmother (“It’s an encyclopedia, but anyone can edit it, so sometimes it’s wrong, but the best articles have references that you can check at the bottom of the page”), she gave me a look that told me she wasn’t quite sure that it was a good idea.
“A blog is like a diary, only it’s online,” my cousin told my uncle. “Well then what’s twitter?!” This was a harder question; I don’t tweet, but I get the gist. “It’s like a facebook status,” I began, then stopped. “It's... sort of like a blog, only you’re limited to a certain amount of characters, so you can’t say much.” I was more pleased with this explanation, but then it turned out that what my uncle really wanted to know was the difference between “twitter” and “tweet.” I explained that “twitter” was the website itself, and “tweeting” was the act of posting something on said website. He was satisfied.
It’s very difficult to explain something to someone who has no frame of reference for it, like trying to describe how to drive to someone who has never seen a car before.
There’s nothing wrong with not knowing about the internet. Maybe it’s us, the internet generation, that are the weird ones. We need to go outside (without our phones) and take a walk. Roll down a hill. Jump over a stream. Avoid cow patties in a pasture. The whole world is not on the internet.
There are lots of things that are way more important than what’s online.
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