# notes --- - [[there is no singular experience of the internet]] - [[{1.2a1a1} the internet lets you try on new identities]] # summary --- This was a short piece that ends very abruptly, but it made me feel *incredibly* nostalgic in only a few paragraphs. Stephen's main point is that there is no ubiquitous experience of what being Online means; even though we're all using the same technology, the way we engage with it is incredibly varied. He mentions an anecdote in David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 Kenyon College graduation speech, [“This is Water”]([This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio) (fs.blog)](https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/)): >There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” The idea that we can see everything from our corners of the internet is the same concept; we're so enmeshed in this stuff that it's difficult to remember that what we see isn't even a fraction of whatever the rest of this is. # highlights --- > I’ve always thought of people’s accounts of their time online as akin to picking up someone’s iPhone, or their personal computer. The interface is recognizable, but the way they use it is totally alien... Even if the tools are the same, the way we use them differs wildly from person to person. Same goes for our experiences. >In my generation, the first that grew up alongside the internet, there was a sense that the internet was a wild, dangerous place — a new American frontier, almost, with almost all the baggage that phrase implies. >It wasn’t all bad. It couldn’t be. <mark style="background: #CACFD9A6;">It was a home for our first writing, our first art; the setting for some of our first private relationships; the place where you could try on new identities and work out who you really were</mark>... All this happened in the private space between our brains, our hands, and our machines... >I think the illusion that there’s one discrete internet that we can speak confidently about descends from the misapprehension that you can see everything from your perch online, wherever that is. Here I think of the opening anecdote of [that famous DFW speech](https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/) more than I’d like to admit: this, whatever it is, is water. Though I’d argue in this particular medium we’re less fish and more our primordial marine ancestors. >It is strange to have a continuous awareness of the world outside of your immediate perceptions; it is strange to know, at any given moment, an approximation of what thousands of people who aren’t you are thinking about. >[The problems on the internet, like disinformation] are fundamentally the same problems you get when you put a bunch of people in a room or a country together.