I pretty much just summed up two of my favourite all-time web memes — and both can be credited to American politicians who were probably not the most technologically savvy guys (if there’s an understatement award, I just won it).

The history of the word “internets” is pretty short, having been coined by George Bush on October 17th, 2000 in the third Gore-Bush presidential debate (interestingly, note that the word “interweb” — another term that poked fun at the technologically not-so-adept — had already been around for a few years).

The “series of tubes” meme has been around even less time. Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens used his “series of tubes” analogy to explain his position on net neutrality. Senator Stevens’ explanation was mocked shortly thereafter on a Wired blog. Here’s what Ted Stevens actually said:

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.

We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time.

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

Definitely not the best explanation I’ve ever heard of how the internet works (although he is certainly right about one thing, the internet is not, in fact, a truck).

Now, I’m not going to restate that Bush or Stevens doesn’t understand the internet — I think that position has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet what these two phrases have in common is their same ability to serve as an indicator of one’s knowledge of a particular area, much like “Leeroy Jenkins” in my post yesterday.

What occurred to me since writing that post however, was that a particular group develops somewhat of a back catalogue of memes — and the web, being both a breeding ground and a fluid record of all types of memes, has brought us a greater awareness of these memes.

When I took a look at Wikiepdia’s list of internet memes, I was surprised how few of these I was actually familiar with (especially for someone who spends too much time online). This also demonstrates that much like the real world, online space is not a wide-open field that we all explore regularly.

Just like the physical world, we tend to stick to the same areas, visit the same places (work, school, the grocery store, the bank, whatever) and do the same things. We venture out only when we have a concrete but unusual need like finding a jewelery shop or a furniture store (or are just really bored, in which case we might end up reading all kinds of weird articles on Wikipedia).