Long ago, in a university dorm room built for one, lived two freshmen girls. In the tiny room one Sunday afternoon in late fall of 1995, a mix tape played on a stereo that sat atop a dresser. Within reach, a stack of VHS tapes rested on a shelf below a TV/VCR, next to a corded phone with an answering machine nearby. As one girl sat on her twin-extra-long bed eating cereal, her roommate burst through the door holding a big, white box-like object with some cords dangling from it. “It’s one of those things—a modem!” she said. “If we can figure out how it works, we can do email here instead of waiting in line at the computer lab.” The other girl responded, “Wow! Right here in our room?” There was a girl down the hall who knew how to hook up this contraption, and when she attached it to the Macintosh SE on one of the desks, the girls heard, for the first time, part of the soundtrack to their year: the screeching crackle of a dial-up connection for this modern way to communicate . . . the internet.
Well, it’s 2017, and the internet is no longer a novelty. The word internet is now a part of everyday life. But even though technology has evolved rapidly, language has been slower to evolve.
Since the introduction of the internet, the term has always been capitalized (in the United States and Canada). It was once something new; therefore, its capitalization was warranted. It was a way to differentiate The Internet (a global network) from an internet (any network). But now that the internet is a common part of our lives, no distinction needs to be made.
You can now use a lowercase “i” in the term internet. The recently published 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style instructs that the term is no longer capitalized.
My generation and the previous may see technology as something relatively new and important—worthy of a capital letter. But those who grew up with technology everywhere don’t see the internet as uncommon. It makes sense; we don’t capitalize telephone or television.
Language often becomes simplified over time, and that’s what has happened with the word internet. It takes slightly less time to type a word when all its letters are lowercase; therefore, it’s simpler to not capitalize internet. Also, elimination of unnecessary capital letters creates a smoother reading experience because the readers’ eyes are not distracted by the visual obstacle a capital letter presents. Many editors are happy with this change. We want to give readers as seamless a reading process as possible and eliminate all distractions, such as unnecessary capital letters, so readers can focus on what’s most important—the content.
This change in the capitalization of internet is good news for those of you who’ve always thought it shouldn’t be capitalized. But for those of you who aren’t happy with this change, can you still use the capital “I”?
It comes down to following established, current guidelines. Now that it’s okay to use all lowercase letters for internet, you’ll seem old-fashioned if you don’t (like if you use two spaces after a period). And this means your readers may see the information you’re presenting as outdated (like a WiFi-less dorm room in 2017).
There’s no need to take the extra two seconds to capitalize internet. You can spend that time doing something else—like checking your email.
