Over a career spanning nearly 50 years, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog, 73, has managed to gracefully pivot from outrageous and eccentric narrative films (“Aguirre: Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo”) to poignant and poetic documentaries (“Cave of Forgotten Dreams”). Now, Mr. Herzog has set his eye on the internet, or what he calls “the thing.”

“Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World” (the title is a mild spoiler) traces the internet’s rise from its bewildering inception on California college campuses in the late 1960s and offers postulations about its future and possibilities from experts, some of them dread-filled and others hopeful. Mr. Herzog, who says he sporadically uses Google Maps but never any social networks, spoke on the phone about his own relationship with technology, the similarities between Paleolithic caves and the internet, and why he chooses not to carry a cellphone. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Given where you have shot films before — the jungles of Peru and deep caverns in southern France — I was wondering if you saw the virtual world as just another wilderness to explore?

I’m a curious person. That’s the key to everything. When you see the Paleolithic caves in southern France, it is a virtual world as well, so it’s very much about perceptions. The internet is a new phenomenon, but it is a very human sort of phenomenon. We do perceive and examine the world in true applications [via the web], and when we perceive the jungle, what I see is a field of dreams.