I thought it was settled. I thought we all implicitly agreed. I unwittingly believed that we, the citizens of cyber-space, had allowed cyber-language to find its cyber-resting point. That the battle for the internet had been won.
Apparently not. The variety of responses to my tweeted complaint about people continuing to capitalise the word ‘internet’ was surprising. It seems that on twitter, people have a lot of feelings about the language of technology. Complicated feelings. Feelings about words like ‘cyber’ and the usage of punctuation in words like ‘e-book’ and ‘e-mail’.
Technology magazine Wired shifted from Internet to internet back in 2004, calling the move a “stylistic reality check”. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage advises that for now they will be retaining the capital I, although they have progressed to deleting the hyphen from ‘email’.
Back when Malcolm Turnbull invented it, The Internet was a new and singular concept that needed a proper name, something solid to ground the intangible network of interconnected technologies. But as with any new technology, eventually it becomes ordinary due to familiarity, and capitalisation is unnecessary. To capitalise ‘internet’ makes the author look ill at ease with modernity.
Pedants and tech history geeks argue that as The Internet is the formal name of the network that evolved from ARPANET (a US Department of Defense project that was the basis for the modern internet), and therefore as a proper noun, it should be capitalised as per the rules of English grammar.
An IBM publication from 1989 states that ‘internet’ is a “contraction of the phrase interconnected network. However, when written with a capital "I," the Internet refers to the worldwide set of interconnected networks. Hence, the Internet is an internet, but the reverse does not apply.”
Indeed, most technology companies continue to preserve this ancient doctrine, handed down by the computer elders; though shalt capitalise the Internet, the one network that connects and rules them all. Microsoft and Apple software both automatically capitalise internet. Human agency is abdicated to autocorrect, unless you choose to fight against the machine and painstakingly educate your device about the evolution of language usage.
One of the best responses I received from my twitter rant was from an academic who provided a book reference positing that treating the internet as either a being or a place by granting it proper noun status would “lead to granting the internet agency and power that are better granted to those who develop and use it.”
Maybe the grammar pedants are right. It has been suggested that the evolution of language mirrors the evolution of species – perhaps ours is on the decline. But as always in arguments about language, it comes down to rules versus usage. I like rules as much as anyone (if not more), but English is a living language, and the rules shift depending on how it is used.
The most convincing argument for treating internet as a common noun is the fact that it has evolved into a generic mode of human communication, like books, newspapers, radio and television. Unless we start capitalising the Telephone, it seems silly to apply a different rule to the internet.
Anne Treasure works in communications, is a recent survivor of the book industry, and exists mainly on the Internet.
