The Internet is alive: February 10, 1997 issue of New Thinking

February 10, 1997 New Thinking:
The Internet is alive

Website content management

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February 10, 1997

The Internet is alive

This week's issue of New Thinking is by:
Paul "the soarING" Siegel

The Internet is alive! Not an inanimate information highway for people to cruise or surf. A growing organism! Not a static medium, such as a newspaper, a magazine, radio or TV. A learning creature! Not merely a system for the exchange of products and services.

The Internet is alive! An infant. A baby. Just forming. But very different from a human baby. A human is born of 2 parents. It inherits characteristics from and is nurtured by these 2 parents. The Internet is born of millions of parents. It inherits characteristics from and is nurtured by all these millions.

The Internet is alive! It has a skeleton to support it, a circulatory system to give it life, and a nervous system to control its life.

The skeleton is not the physical backbones, wires, cables, computers, and modems. It is the broad overall system for the communication of ideas. The skeleton is mental.

The circulatory system does not have one pump which pumps blood to all parts of the body. It consists of thousands - soon to be millions - of hearts, spread throughout the system. Each Internet site is a heart. Not a heart that pushes, but one that pulls. Not a pump, but a learning fountain. It pulls by being attractive, by offering the many cells (netizens) in the system opportunities for learning. It is a learning facilitator.

The nervous system is remarkably similar to the human nervous system, except of course, it works with larger elements. The human nervous system consists of billions of neurons, all participating in a town-hall meeting. Each neuron receives signals from other neurons and when the sum of these signals exceeds a certain threshold, it votes in favor of some action. The system follows majority rule. The nervous system of the Internet consists of millions of people, each making choices with their browsers. Here too, majority wins.

Seeing the Internet as a living, growing, thriving organism leads to three major rules of Internet marketing:

Enhance learning: The best way to attract visitors to your site is by making it a superb learning fountain, one that influences people by helping them learn. This way, your site can nourish many netizens, and not become a useless "appendix."
Cooperate with fellow businesspeople: Competition among netizens causes them to work against each other and stifles life and growth of the Internet. Cooperation, however, can be one of the best ways to publicize your site. It can lead to a well-balanced and thriving Internet.
Build community: As a rugged individualist, you can accomplish almost nothing on the Internet. By cooperating with others of like mind, goals, ideas, or attitude, you can build a strong community to help each member of the community succeed.

The Internet is alive! It is sustained by cooperative learning fountains building community among netizens of the Globe.

Paul "the soarING" Siegel

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The nervous system of the Internet consists of millions of people, each making choices with their browsers.