media, as Anders suggests. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the internet taken broadly shouldn't be considered as a medium at all, but a domain or infrastructure for various media. But as
Thanks Christopher for stating the obvious. The internet IS the infrastructure and other things happen on it. The packet could care less. Its 'purpose in life' is to get from point A to point B, preferably without colliding with any other packet (if it does, ethernet constraints tell it what to do). It carries data not messages. The messages, etc. are coded at one end and decoded at the other end. The internet is not a media! although I can see how it carries that burden today. People are still confounding the internet with the WWW. The web has expressive elements, the internet does not.
there are certainly a lot of layers to this. some packets [s/packets/communicative acts] are, by their very existence, messages. (e.g., ping packets or ICMP packets or syn/ack packets...) is an IM "presence" indicator a message? the jabber folks sure think so... from the technorhetorician/jargonaut end of things, some packets are more data-oriented than others. e.g., streaming protocols, etc. but even those have session setup/teardown 'messages' that are sent - often in just a packet or two. intuitively connected frames I'm thinking of: Shannon/Weaver Peirce Stanley Fish (reader-response theory...) McLuhan anybody else got a paradigm in mind that they think relates this stuff? I might argue that even saying that the "web" has expressive elements that the "internet" does not is a little bogus. What sort of "web" experience are we talking about, and what technologies are fundamental to being "web" enabled? (i.e., what if there's no html? what if the whole thing is a Flash .swf file that just happened to be transmitted over HTTP? What if I've tunneled HTTP through DNS packets, or an SSH tunnel, or some other geek stunt? Is that still the web? Or is it something other, something that we have to think about the boundaries and parameters of? What if I use the same technologies for something COMPLETELY unlike what we 'typically' use the w3 for now? Am I "web", or am I just an anachronistic transmission of data blobs from port to port? what delineates 'web' from 'internet' from 'intarnetwebcom' (in my brother's jargon)? this is becoming a Hard conversation :) --elijah