If we had to define the Internet and were suddenly blind to the wires, machines and code that most of us think of when we hear the term, what would we be left with?

It's a question worth thinking about. In a society saturated with and stifled by alienation, our fetish with the props of our human drama too often clouds our ability to see and analyze what's really happening.

We tend to see technology as its "things" and that makes it virtually impossible to understand technology and where it's going.

A telephone sitting idle on a desk isn't "mass telecommunications". An abandoned laboratory isn't "science". And wires and computers aren't the Internet. Exploring those tools in isolation will not, in the end, reveal much truth about where we are and where we're going.

So when it's all erased from the picture, what ARE we left with? A huge, even changing network of human beings: an organic mass. And seeing it that, what does it all mean?

In a series of blogs, I want to try to start talking about the question and I want to start by answering it. :-)

The Internet is a mass network of people all over the world who communicate with whoever they want, whenever they want. It changes fundamentally every second of every day as people log and off. It's organic and its limitations -- for instance, you may want to communicate with someone and can't because they aren't on the Internet -- is merely a matter of development.

One way of looking at the roots of the Internet is to imagine a group of people sitting around a fire a long time ago.

These people spoke a language that had fewer words than ours. Language is, after all, the way we communicate our needs to others and these people's needs were limited to their environment -- its potential and its dangers -- and how they were relating to it.

One of those people was playing with a piece of wood (probably a broken branch), rubbing it against a rock and watching as the stick transformed itself, losing slivers of wood and becoming sharper. As the transformation took place, the others began to pay attention. Their eyes widened and their minds began to work. They were different from the other species around them because those minds were able, not only to see what was there but to imagine what could be there: to not only see the sharpened stick but to imagine what it could do.

Another in the circle became agitated and began making downward motions with his or her hand, pointing excitedly at the ground. The stick holder stopped and looked at the thinker and soon the stick in his or her hand was thrust forcefully into the ground.

And it stood there, erect as they all sat and watched in awe.

And over the next days or weeks or months, others began talking and thinking about the stick, about what else it could do. Some began experimenting with its integration into their daily routine of survival. These were geniuses, visionaries whose remarkable minds understood survival not only as the adaptation to the environment but as the alteration of that environment.

Over time the stick with the sharp point became a tool in that environmental alteration: hunting, gathering, cutting, building, securing and defending.

And the rocks' edges could be sharpened to make knives or dulled to make striking tools. With these tools and others they developed, their world could be transformed into an environment of nurture and nutrition. Its dangers could be shut out by structures and gateways. Its potential could be exploited and expanded.

They had technology.

There are, of course, many theories speculating about all this and all are equally speculative. I have no idea if what I've described ever happened this way or if it was the first foray into technology. No one really knows.

But we can be sure that technology's roots lie in the deep ground of human cooperation and collaboration, driven by the need to survive and improve lives. We can be sure that the stick sharpener got the idea watching someone else do something similar and we can be sure that, if the group hadn't been sitting there or living with that sharpener or sharing their own experiences, imaginings and ideas with the sharpener, that stick would have been nothing more than a toy, a way to pass the time, an engrossing change one person experienced.

Technology is the collaborative act by humans to use the environment to make tools used to meet our needs.

As humans, our main drive is to collaborate. We have always done so and our ability to do that is the way such a weak, small, slow and rather clumsy species has survived and, in fact, come to dominate the world.

Many other species cooperate; there are long lists of animals that forms societies of all kinds, some of them pretty complex. But actual collaboration -- the act of working together physically and intellectually, meshing ideas and configuring our ideas to incorporate the ideas of others -- that's us. We are collaboration's children.

At a recent meeting of May First/People Link's Planning Committee, a discussion took place over who, exactly, invented the Internet. The common view and one that's historically accurate, is that it was invented by developers working for the government.

In the early 1960's, during the Cold War, the Air Force commissioned the Rand Corporation to do a study about communications in the event of a nuclear devatastation. A man named Paul Baran determined, in his final report, that the key was "packet switching" -- breaking up data into little packets and transmitting it that way.

A few year later, a company called BBN implemented the idea with a huge, and primitive by today's standards, Honeywell computer which linked some nodes and ran some data back and forth. Shortly after that, in 1972, a BBN scientist named Ray Tomlinson developed a protocol for "email" and a year or two after, some scientists (including Vincent Cerf from Stanford) developed a protocol called tcp/ip.

And the Internet was on its way.

Of course, nobody knew about it and what's fascinating about the Internet's history is how, as more and more people began to use it, more and more began working on it collboratively. And the drive of that collaboration over the next 20 years was always to massify it, bring more and more people into it.

The question is why and I think it's because the Internet is the most natural communications technology ever developed: the one that is closest to our most basic instincts and drives. I think it is inherently revolutionary and incompatible with any social and economic system developed up to now. I'm convinced that not only is it helping us develop our world but it is actually transforming human and social behavior in a fundamental way.

I'll have more to say about those ideas in my next blogs.

For now, let me give you a history link. Dave's site, which has been provided all kinds of Internet information for a decade now has a time-line on the Internet that, while cryptic, is invaluable.

http://www.davesite.com/webstation/net-history.shtml