Internet what is it?

While reading the article What is it? Characteristics of the medium I was intrigued with the introduction to see how they would classify the Internet. I was a little disappointed to see that they classified it as both a macro-medium and a meta-medium. Although I agree that is both I figured the argument would be made that the Internet needs to be classified in its own medium. I say this only because you can achieve every single type of communication using the Internet now whether its video, audio, or print you can do it online. Later on in the article when the author started discussing how impossible it is to track how many people are on the Internet or who have access to the Internet I had an epiphany. I did not realize how hard it would be to track how many people have access to the Internet. I mean if you are living somewhere other then a third world country chances are you have access to the Internet. This part of the article made me realize how far communication has come in the past thirty years just with the Internet. You can now communicate with the world just by using your phone, computer, or even your car. It almost puts you in awe as to what could the future be like in another thirty years. Although I already knew about HTML I did not know how long the idea had been around for. I feel that without hypertextuality the Internet would not be what it is today. All the internet would be is a giant page of writing that you would have to scroll through in order to find what your looking for instead of clicking on a link and instantly getting your desired information. If I had to choose one important piece of this article it would be that segment about packet listing. I did not know that each chunk of information had pre-determined on its own how it was going to get where it was going (medium, 15). I had already read about packet listing previously but it really stands out in this article knowing that every little piece of information you send on the internet is going on its own and all your doing is giving it an address.