The first thing you might be won­der­ing, is why? Why is he using “inter­net” as a verb? First of all, wel­come gram­mar Nazi. But one of the first rules of the inter­net is that new words and usages are accept­able, even fash­ion­able. If you can’t accept that, you prob­a­bly shouldn’t really learn how to internet.

That point made, there are a num­ber of actu­ally valu­able why ques­tions about how to inter­net that are truly worth our tak­ing the time to tackle. So let’s begin there.

Why should I care about inter­net­ing? Don’t I already do that?

There’s a big dif­fer­ence between what most peo­ple do on the internet–check Face­book, Google a few things, and maybe check their 10 favorite websites–and inter­net­ing. Inter­net­ing is essen­tially hold­ing a flu­ency with the wide swath of pos­si­ble inter­net activ­i­ties and uti­liz­ing that abil­ity to stay abreast of every­thing from the lat­est news to the lat­est LOL­Cats. It is, in itself, a mas­ter­able cul­ture that is both dis­tinct from those rec­og­nized offline, and deeply enmeshed with them.

Essen­tially, you might care about inter­net­ing if you feel that you’d like to have greater pro­fi­ciency with the youngest, most ver­sa­tile and pow­er­ful form of cul­tural dis­sem­i­na­tion ever invented and you’re bump­ing your head against the wall because you can’t find a foothold from which to begin to under­stand the roil­ing mass.

That’s my fun­da­men­tal intent: to explain to you how I and peo­ple like me use the inter­net on a reg­u­lar basis to do all sorts of things that most civil­ians never knew they could.

Why are you the one to explain how to internet?

I am, as those peo­ple who know me but don’t know the inter­net I know would attest, rather adept at spend­ing time on the inter­net. They con­stantly mar­vel at my abil­ity to do lit­tle out­wardly but be con­stantly enter­tained, informed, and knowl­edgable. Almost of these abil­i­ties are due, at least in part, to the way in which I use the internet.

I make no claim to com­plete mas­tery or knowl­edge of the internet–if I had to hand that crown to one sin­gle per­son I’d prob­a­bly choose Andy Baio–but I can say with cer­tainty that from the time I first saw the inter­net (I think I was about 10 at the time) I’ve been rather obsessed with it. Fif­teen years of spend­ing a min­i­mum of an hour a day with some­thing gives you a pretty thor­ough knowl­edge of how it works.

Why should I learn how to internet?

Because you know it’s impor­tant. As I inti­mated before, I believe the inter­net is the future. All other forms of media dis­sem­i­na­tion are on their way to grave­yard. All other forms of pub­lish­ing will even­tu­ally be sub­jected to the processes and judge­ment of the inter­net, and it’s likely many will be found lack­ing. If you have mon­e­tary inter­est in any form of media that isn’t atten­tive to the inter­net, you’re almost cer­tainly des­tined for the poor house within the next 50 years.

The process of learn­ing how to inter­net is some­thing mil­lions of peo­ple do every year (even with­out guides like this). As peo­ple con­tinue to gain ever greater flu­ency in the inter­net and it’s ways they will leave behind writ­ers, pub­lish­ers, and peo­ple who think that hav­ing a Face­book page is what it means to be on the internet.

I already know all about RSS, pod­casts, Word­Press, red­dit, and many other things, why should I pay atten­tion to this?

You clearly have good rea­son to ques­tion the value of this, as those are rather close to what I intend to talk about. Here are two rea­sons you might care: because you can always learn from see­ing how other peo­ple see and think about the things you know how to do well, and because you’re inter­ested in help­ing some­one who doesn’t know enough to be aware of Lone Gun­man to get bet­ter at interneting.