Surfing Needs Waves

Surf the Web? This phrase's ubiquity is alarming, frankly, especially since it makes no sense at all.

The point was driven home in a piece I typed (I could say penned, but that would be a filthy lie) earlier about something completely unrelated to surfing or webs, but which caused me to stop and puzzle for a moment over the terminology. Then I saw the beginning of this article and the point was re-driven into my brain. Surf the web.

The article in question wasn't about surfing or webs either... well, to be honest, a case could be made, but the relevant piece of said article follows:

Web use isn't called "surfing" just because it's exciting and fun and dangerous, with sharks lurking below the surface. On the web, "surfing" describes the way we navigate a vast ocean of information, skimming over the surface, searching for that one great wave to bring it on home.

Bullplop! I say again, horsehockey!

We don't surf the Web. We crawl the Web, much like any other network. I don't care whether we're looking for information and skipping everything we don't need; you don't surf an encyclopedia, do you? No, you skim it. That's the description of the activity taking place when you don't go into depth in your reading.

The Internet is a network, and Web as nomenclature suits it just as well as Net or Distributed Array (don't argue with me, I know it's not right). It's a series of interconnected items, and since the interconnections are many-to-many (but technically only one-way) Chain doesn't really cut it. Besides, World Wide Chain doesn't really have the same ring to it.

If it was the World Wide Waves, then surfing would be an adequate description of the activity, simply because it would fit in. But since one does not surf a web (unless spiders are doing something when we're not looking) and since surfing doesn't really describe the activity, that's two strikes. Granted, you need three strikes to be out, but that's why baseball metaphors don't work in this situation, just as surfing metaphors don't work when speaking of a network.

We're always going to be surfing the Web though, because, way back when, someone said it and it stuck. If that's not a depressing thought, I don't know what is. But take heart; the activities involved in Web 2.0 (well, as far as I can tell, since I don't think anyone really knows what the hell Web 2.0 involves, really) don't map onto surfing at all, so maybe somewhere down the line we'll all be saying something different.

It'll probably be equally stupid.