Intro to Interverse

What even is the interverse? That was my exact thought when reading this assignment. When you think of interverse, you might think of the bare definition... the internet and universe coming together. But what REALLY is the internet?

In class we were asked the same thing, "what is the internet?" and "what is it made of?". Immediately I of course started to think of a million different things, honestly what is it made up of... codes, systems, wires, circuits? I realized I've never really taken the time to think about all of this, I'm just used to it just being there. We were given post-it notes and told to write one word answers to the questions we were asked. I wrote down "system" and "codes" because that what I think its made up of, at least a small part of it. Other people wrote things like information, networking, sharing, community, global, and memory for the question "what is the internet" and then ideas, people, information, space, and sources for the question "what is it made of". It was interesting to see that some words were used for each question, but what really stood out to me was the word "community". When I think of the internet and what its made of I've never really thought of the word community, but when you really think about it almost EVERYONE used the internet and shares ideas and learns things from others. I guess it really is just like one worldwide community.

After this we split up in groups and answered the question "how does the internet work" in our own words on a big sheet of paper, my group came up with the idea that the internet first starts with people putting in information and ideas, and that goes into the internet space so that others begin to build their own inputs/ideas based on others ideas, which causes people to stat sharing and networking, and all of that ends up going global all over the world and starting over again!! That might have ben a bit hard to keep up with, but ultimately its one never ending cycle of inputting ideas/information and sharing all over the world. Crazy to think about!

That quick warm up led us into the exploration of the internet and what it really was made of. We first opened up Firefox on the classroom Mac computers, and a text editor (not a word processor) called Text Wrangler. Our professor had us download a zip file he had created and inside it was a folder of something called "index.html, "style", and an image. We opened up "index.html" to Firefox and there was a webpage with an interesting image and text under the picture saying "put text here". It was interesting because there was no "www." but instead just an ".html". On the mac we clicked on tools and then page source this then opened another tab of text, I guessed this was the website coding. I was starting to get confused because I have never done this sort of thing before and it wasn't making too much sense at this point. We opened this text into the Text Wrangler app so that we were able to actually edit the text and ultimately edit the website. In the text there was a spot that said "put text here" we were able to erase that and type in our own text. After this we saved the text in wrangler, and switched back over to Firefox where we refreshed the page with the image. Once we refreshed it, my text was there! It was actually pretty cool learning how to decode a website, but also a bit confusing as well.

Once we did that, we were told to change the image. Now this was pretty frustrating because at this point I was getting really confused and my eyes started hurting so bad (Cataracts and astigmatism is not fun I can tell ya that!), but we had to save an image into the same folder as the other files and then type in the name of the image into Text Wrangler in place of the original image. Then we did the same thing; save the Text Wrangler, go back to Firefox, refresh and it was there! Honestly it didn't work at first because I didn't save the image into the original folder with the files... maybe that's why I got so frustrated, oops! But hey, I finally got it!

This assignment was a little stressful for me because I have never done this before and I have never really understood online coding and such. I am still curious if people who create websites actually do all of this or if it's done through an application, even though I got slight anxiety from this I think it's a good thing to know about! Hopefully the more I do it, the easier it will get.