I know why it's called the web

Jan 10 2008 Huddersfield Daily Examiner

‘THE World Wide Web is such an all-encompassing notion that many people cannot imagine what life would be like without it.

This electronic link into the ether supports many millions of transmissions a day, and is a thoroughfare – nay, an impossibly broad, impossibly busy High Street – running slap-dab through everything the human race does, whether its members are in Melbourne or Mongolia, Birmingham or Brunei, Tewkesbury or Tuvalu.

No business worthy of the name can afford not to be on the Web.

Everybody must have, somewhere in their points of contact, which have traditionally included their postal address and phone and fax numbers, something that starts ‘http://www...’

A subset of the Web is the internet, which has replaced ‘snail mail’ or postal packages as a means of communication. If you are a functioning human being in 2008 Britain you are more likely than not to have both a business email address and a home email address.

When my computer hard drive crashed last year I was left without a home email address and no domestic means of climbing back on board the Great Google with its Wikipedia.

I could not ‘surf’ or download or upload. This amounted to disablement. I had entered a communications desert.

When I did get a new computer the machine would not ‘speak’ to my wireless broadband network, no matter what equipment I tried.

Well, the first step, of course, is to get in touch with one’s service provider, to see if their technical department can help.

I don’t want to make an example here of Virgin Media (formerly ntl) because I imagine they’re all pretty much the same, but if you ring for help the calls cost 10p to connect and 25p a minute thereafter.

You have to bear in mind that for quite a long time they will regularly interrupt the playing of whatever piece of cheesy electronic music they have chosen as background noise to tell you that their advisers are all very busy and will be with you as soon as possible.

When you have spent £10 or £20 you may get someone who will tell you that technical help is available on http://www.technicalhelp.com

And your response will be, as mine was, that a website is no help to me at all since the nub of the problem is that I can’t use the Web.

This simple fact is something that nobody seems to be able to comprehend.

I bought something called a wireless card, which is a thing you carefully stick in the back of your computer to enhance the signal from a broadband transmitter.

To make this wireless card work I was advised to log on to http://www.wirelesscard.co.uk/help I couldn’t. Lord knows I wanted to, but I couldn’t. You see, they just don’t understand.

The best analogy I can come up with is you want to buy your first car. You phone the car dealer and he says: “Why don’t you drive over and we’ll show you all our models?”

And you say: “I haven’t got a car. That’s what I want to talk to you about.” And there’s a horrible silence on the other end of the line as the car salesman tries to come to terms with the fact that the person he is speaking to doesn’t have a car.

During my long sojourn in No Broadband Land I had cause to call in to a computer warehouse to try to obtain something called a ‘driver’. This ‘driver is a piece of software that helps a piece of hardware like a printer or a camera to ‘talk’ to your computer.

This particular ‘driver’ was the one thing I needed to link my dysfunctional broadband transmitter to my wireless card. Oh, and before we go any further it should be noted that I have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m just telling you the story.

Anyway, the technical adviser at the computer store said: “You can get a free driver update from the Web at http://driverupdate.com.”

And I said: “No I can’t. Because I’m wanting the driver precisely for that reason. If I was already connected to the Web I would not need the driver update.”

And he stared at me as if I didn’t have a head. After a while he muttered: “Can’t you download a driver using another machine?” And I said: “No. I can afford only the one computer. Besides, if I had another computer I would still have to get it to ‘talk’ to the Web, for which I need …”

And I gave him a little space in which to think about how the sentence might end.

“ … a free driver update?” he finally ventured.

I don’t know if this was a moment of enlightenment either for him or me, but I did feel that we had finally communicated in a meaningful way.

The driver update didn’t work, incidentally, but I’m not going to labour the point. I’m mindful of the fact, however, that the Web isn’t called the Web for nothing. The original ones are something spiders use to trap and kill their food.