--- title: The Internet slug: the-internet description: Using the web well is a general literacy, not a technical specialty — and its absence is hiding in plain sight. tags: [web, internet, literacy] image: https://davidwindham.com/til/img/power-manager.jpg hide_table_of_contents: true draft: true --- Just a place to start an essay. SCAFFOLD NOTES: These HTML comments are the outline. Write prose above/around them, then delete them. Leftover frontmatter to fix: `image` still points at power-manager.jpg (a solar/energy post); tags I changed from [energy, house, solar] to [web, internet, literacy] — revert if you'd rather. COLD OPEN (no heading): eight-to-ten people in a room, each a seat of expertise; yours is labeled "web development." The realization: the questions circle a gap nobody names — not about code or servers, but about how to *use* the thing itself. Hook: everyone assumes web literacy is universal. It isn't; it just looks that way because we all touch the internet all day. Pick ONE concrete, anonymized detail from a real meeting. ## The World Wide Web THE DISTINCTION. The internet is the pipes — packets, protocols, servers. The Web is what Berners-Lee built on top: documents that are addressable (URLs), linked, and open. It was *designed*, with a philosophy. Beat to hit: you can be fluent in the pipes and illiterate in the Web — and most technical competence lives in the former. ## How We Stopped Using It THE DIAGNOSIS (was "History"). The drift from *navigating* the web to *receiving* it — feeds and walled gardens replaced direct navigation. Lost habits: typing a URL, bookmarks, RSS, going direct to a source, following a link off the edge of a platform. Mechanism: the interface stopped *requiring* competence, so competence atrophied. Diagnostic, not nostalgic. ## Using It Well THE PRACTICAL CORE (was "Purposes"). The part a colleague could quietly photocopy: search as craft (real questions, operators, past page one); reading a URL (domain/TLD/path as trust signals); the address bar as a command line; pull over push (RSS/feeds vs. the algorithm); the memory of the web (Wayback, archiving, link rot); owning a corner (a domain, a site, notes you control); source-first habits. ## Not a Specialty but a Literacy THE QUIET ARGUMENT (was "Varients"). The category error: people file "using the web well" under *technical*, so they assume it's the web-dev seat's job. It isn't — it's everyone's. Code expertise is narrow; competence with the medium is broad. This is where the meetings pay off without being named — a reader in a similar room recognizes themselves. ## A Place You Live THE CLOSE. Turn from diagnosis to invitation: the web as a commons, a public library, a place to be a citizen rather than a consumer. Bring "you" back in — using it well is reclaiming agency over your own attention and knowledge. Leave the stranger who finds this in three years something to *do*, not just nod at.


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