When you are surfing the web, what do you think to yourself when you click on a link that says “here”? Something? Nothing? Chances are, if you are like most people, your brain sends a nerve impulse down your muscle fibers to your index finger and that finger depresses your mouse button and… that’s it. Some arcane, unintelligible system of 1’s and 0’s and electricity and wires and cables and god knows what else changes the appearance of your computer screen and you.. what? You arrive at “here” wherever the hell that is.

To tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure why I find this so fascinating but I really do. I think of it kind of like the word “here” in the English language was sort of instantly upgraded when the world wide web came into existence. All of a sudden, millions and millions of webpages all over the world displayed these little boxes and phrases saying “Click here” or “do it here” or “go here” or “email me here” or something similar. But the web is forgiving in many ways with its convenient little “back” button. So, if you “go here” and then you change your mind or you realize you don’t want to “go here,” you just click the back button and you’re not “here” anymore. Magic. Right?

You get magically whisked this and that way until you have no clue where the hell you are anymore. Now, when this sort of thing first came out, I’m sure people didn’t really take it too seriously or they didn’t think that when they “clicked here,” they would be doing anything of great significance.

Now I might be going out on a limb here but I’m tempted to say that all this “here” business on the world wide web has interfered with “here” in the real world. Once we became accustomed to this “going here” and “clicking here” and the effortlessness of doing so, our sense of place in the physical plane of existence became shrunken and diminished with disuse.

I mean, imagine how many signs back in the day in America read stuff like “Eat here,” “Shop here,” “Park here,” etc. There are many signs all over the place that still say stuff like that. Somehow, the internet managed to undercut all those old signs with “here” in them. It managed to push them to the margins of our consciousness when once they occupied the forefront and thus to propel some of the places which they represented into disrepair. To my mind, this accounts, at least partially, for the financial crisis of 2008. The shops and stores and places of business with their “heres” in the real world were overtaken by online “heres” and the world’s only known business model up till that point in time (brick and mortar businesses where goods and services are rendered for payments made) crashed.

But I actually feel like I’m getting off topic a little bit. The purpose of this post is to identify a strange phenomenon unique to internet travel and the word “here.” I seek to ask the question, what has this process (the identifying a word in question [here], using a pointer [or finger] to select it, click on it, and be transported in some way) has done to our understanding of and the reality of the word “here.” In other words, Where is “here?” What is “here?” Is there in fact, something unusual about this particular word in the English language that makes it uniquely suited to use in the world wide web? When we see the word “here” on street signs and in roadways and other things like that in the world around us, do we react to it differently now that it is so often used as a linking word in the web?

Essentially, what I am most interested in is the actual act of being “transported” if you will using a link on the world wide web that says, “Click here.” Basically, I think this sort of transportation is impossible to detect using any of the physical or mental senses. If you are being taken somewhere in a car, on a plane, a boat, a vehicle of some kind, you feel the motion underneath you, you know you are moving, going somewhere, you can usually tell (although it is easiest when the initial shift occurs, when the vehicle you happen to be in first begins to move, after that first moment, it becomes more difficult). When the web “does its thing” and takes you to some new page, new website, there is utterly no way of “sensing” that you are being transported somewhere. Which further begs the question: ARE YOU actually going somewhere? Are you “here?” Are you going “here?” Or is this “here” absolutely nowhere? And every new here we see online is just another nowhere that actually doesn’t really exist?

Logically, it seems to me that to go from point A to point B, there must be some way of discerning that displacement is occurring: that you are leaving A and traveling to B. So the web must be like this musn’t it? When you “Click here,” you must be leaving some different “here” for the “here” you are clicking on and if that is so, there must be some way of “sensing” that you are departing the current “here” and going to the new “here” in the link saying “click here.” Some way. Perhaps reserved only for a select few who know how.

But it stands to reason that sensing this kind of movement from online “here” to “here,” should be intuitive and not esoteric. After all, any Joe Blow can tell when a car is moving or standing still, when a plane is flying or on the ground, when a boat is afloat upon the sea or at rest. There are always telltale signs: the sound of an engine, the motion of the sea, the increased pressure in your ears on an airplane, etc. So is there some sort of similar telltale sign for knowing when you are moving from website to website? From place to place online? From “here” to “here”? From “here” to “there?”

Of course, there is always the chance that “here” in the online sense simply can’t be compared to “here” in the physical universe. And that there is no parallel for using our senses to discern when we are at rest or in motion in the real world versus hopping from online address to online address.

Winding down, online travel strikes me as inherently different from travel in the real world. Essentially, when you go from place to place on the web, the only way you can tell that anything has changed is with your eyes and ears. You can’t touch, smell, or taste anything in the world wide web. When you go from place to place in the real world, you can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste that things are different (in theory). The food is different in the South than it is in the North (taste). The weather is hotter near the equator than at the poles (touch). Smell seems like sort of useless sense to me actually these days, I mean who the hell knows how to distinguish anything by its smell other than perfumes and colognes and beauty products and so forth. My point is, the web is limited to sight and sound at this point in time so that’s all you can use to determine where you are in the world wide web and that’s inherently limiting. I mean, you could dig around in somebody’s code and look for email addresses or names or bits of telltale code or something but theoretically, if you wanted to figure out where you were in the physical universe, there would be many more things at your disposal to do so than if you were trying to figure out what website you were on when you didn’t know already.

So “here” in the world wide web is composed only of sights and sounds. “Here” in the physical universe is composed of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touches (sensations). I look forward to a time when “click here” will take me to a “place” I can not only hear and see but smell, taste, and touch. Wouldn’t that be something? 😉

Finally, I think use of the internet has taught many of us to view webpages we are accessing and information technology we are using as disconnected from any kind of tangible reality. In other words, this may perhaps have taught many of us to see ourselves, our worlds, our family, our friends, as similarly disconnected from any kind of tangible reality. But this simply is not the case. Everything we access online and everywhere we “go” on the web has some root in reality, if only very minor. We would be wise to respect these fragile roots and ties to the real world while we make our merry way through the world wide web.