Is the word "Internet" being used less and less?
The word "Internet" is here to stay — but now it's an old celebrity, who everyone knows, but who doesn’t appear in so many movies (i.e. conversations). We use it much less than around 25 years ago...
Some words appear and quickly disappear. Others have been here since the beginning of time and nobody forgets them. Then there are those that appear like an explosion, are used constantly ‒ and then, suddenly, calm down and leave the stage.
The Internet still has the air of being a recent thing, on the crest of the wave of time, even if the first transmission on the network that gave rise to the structure we know today occurred more than 50 years ago. If you caught me off guard and asked me if the word is being used more and more, I might answer yes...
But, in fact, as we use the Internet itself more and more, we use the name we gave it less and less. Don't believe me? There are several ways to check, but we can start by using a free and very interesting tool called Google Trends. It allows us to see the corresponding amount of searches on a particular topic on Google over time. Well, if we search for "Internet", worldwide, we can see a downward trend in recent years (this is just one possible fact, among others, of course):
But why? If we are not using the Internet less, why are we talking about it less? Actually, that's precisely why. The Internet is no longer a novelty. It is so integrated into our lives that now the pieces of the big machine are what we are most interested in: the apps on our mobile phone, the Wi-Fi network at home, the websites where we spend our time...
The structure itself has receded into the background. It's like electricity. I imagine that, in the days when it appeared in our cities, the word "electricity" was used very frequently. It was big news. Over time, it became just another part of our lives, so important that we stopped even noticing it. Just like the Internet.
There are other reasons: some words have replaced the expression "on the Internet". We use "network", "net" and “online”, among others. These all refer to the Internet, but the name itself is starting to be used on fewer occasions. Yes, we still want to know what the price of the Internet is when we sign up for a new contract ‒ and we use the word when we want to talk specifically about the computer structure which the world of today depends on. But few people say, for example, "I'm going to turn on the Internet", "this is on the Internet". We would say "Look what I just saw on Facebook" or "look on Google" or some other variation. A phrase like "I'm going home to surf the Internet." has an undeniable taste of 1996 about it. (It should be said that these uses will also vary depending on age, region, situation. Perhaps ‒ and this is just a hypothesis ‒ the word is more typical today of grandparents than grandchildren.)
Words are not immutable objects, used in a mechanical and predictable way. They are something else, difficult to grasp or describe ‒ they both gain strength and almost disappear, they subtly change meaning without asking permission, while helping us to understand the world, to imagine what we don't know and to talk to others. From time to time, they decide to leave the stage and give way to the younger ones, while still gracing us with their presence when needed. That's what happened to our old friend “Internet”.
I’d like to thank Jennifer King, my colleague at Eurologos-Portugal, for proofreading the text.