Netizen Speak

(Published on 9 January 2007 in 'Women at Work' - W @ W - a supplement of the Daily Mirror, Colombo, Sri Lanka)

Netizens, referring to citizens belonging to the world of Internet come from a different planet for not only do they speak a strange language, they are also governed by their own set of rules and regulations. While we the citizens of mother earth are still coming to terms with what we call disputes, quarrels, clashes and battles, the netizens are fighting what they call a Flame War. While the rest of us think that Archie was a comic book, the Netizens believe that Archie is a tool (software) for finding files stored on anonymous FTP sites. While we, the ordinary are still trying to cope with cockroaches and mosquitoes, our netizen friends speak of spiders that they also call worms or crawlers.

Eddy Peters could not have been more correct when he said that: “Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages; it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets.” This holds true for the Netizen language as well. Except, that this time around, - it’s the English Language that’s at the receiving end.

If you by now are already fidgeting in your seat wondering what this is all about – here’s an opportunity for you to bring yourself up to speed on the various terms that are used online by the netizens.

Backbone: A high-speed line or series of connections, that forms a major pathway within a network.

Bandwidth: How much stuff you can send through a connection. Usually measured in bits-per-second.

Bit (Binary DigIT): The smallest unit of computerised data.

Browser: A software that is used to look at various kinds of Internet resources.

Byte: A set of Bits that represent a single character. Usually there are 8 Bits in a Byte.

Cookie: Refers to a piece of information sent by a Web Server to a Web Browser that the Browser software is expected to save and to send back to the Server whenever the browser makes additional requests from the Server.

Cyberpunk: Cyberpunk was originally a cultural sub-genre of science fiction taking place in a not-so-distant, dystopian, over-industrialized society. The term grew out of the work of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and has evolved into a cultural label encompassing many different kinds of human, machine, and punk attitudes.

Cyberspace: Term originated by author William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer the word Cyberspace is currently used to describe the whole range of information resources available through computer networks.

Finger: An Internet software tool for locating people on other Internet sites. Finger is also sometimes used to give access to non-personal information, but the most common use is to see if a person has an account at a particular Internet site.

Fire Wall: A Fire Wall is a combination of hardware and software that separates a LAN into two or more parts for security purposes.

Flame War: A Flame War is when an online discussion degenerates into a series of personal attacks against the debaters, rather than discussion of their positions. A heated exchange.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language): The coding language used to create Hypertext documents for use on the World Wide Web.

IP Number: (Internet Protocol Number): Sometimes called a dotted quad. A unique number consisting of 4 parts separated by dots, e.g. 176.143.248.2. Every machine that is on the Internet has a unique IP number.

ISP (Internet Service Provider): An institution that provides access to the Internet in some form, usually for money.

Modem (MOdulator, DEModulator): A device that you connect to your computer and to a phone line that allows the computer to talk to other computers through the phone system.

Port: First and most generally, a port is a place where information goes into or out of a computer. A port also refers to a number that is part of a URL, appearing after a colon (:) right after the domain name. And finally, a port refers to translating a piece of software to bring it from one type of computer system to another.

Spam: An inappropriate attempt to use a mailing list, or other networked communications facility as if it was a broadcast medium by sending the same message to a large number of people who didn’t ask for it.

Spider: A software robot that serves a search engine by exploring the net, collecting web page addresses and page contents, and following links from them to other addresses to collect still more web information. Also known as a worm or crawler.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator): The standard way to give the address of any resource on the Internet that is part of the World Wide Web (WWW).

Words and terms from the Netizen language are now being embraced by the English language as they are now in common use. In the words of John French:

“Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place.”


Miss Know-All
miss.know.all@gmail.com