What is the internet?

What a hard question to answer. As a computer science student hoping to graduate this spring and go into web development, I could not imagine my life without the internet. I think most students, no matter their field, would agree. The internet is how I learn and it is how I stay engaged with the world around me. It is how I take breaks from work and beyond that, how I complete my work; I could not imagine life without stackoverflow.

Off the question is the internet alive, that makes me think of a philosophical question. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? Aside that, if there is a website that is never visited and no one knows about it, does it exist? Yes, of course. Though to answer the original question, the internet is only alive when people are there to experience it.

The internet is everywhere around us where someone has the ability to access it. It is becoming more and more common out there, with people having a goal of spreading it to the edges of the world (hello, flat earth theorists) and back. The internet is all around us and life would not be the same without it; that both excites me and terrorizes me.