Don't worry about 'noob' questions, that's why we try to assist.
Yes, basically, the ribbon and any copper traces are just an electrical connection between two places. The switches may be a little more complicated than just providing high and low but they do close a circuit between two of the wires.
The complication may be that some circuits like that use a matrix key arrangement, it's difficult to tell from the photograph. If you think of something like a calculator keypad, if each key had two wires to it, there would be so many wires it would be impractical to manufacture and would need many solder joints. A trick is used to reduce the number of wires, instead of each switch being individually wired, they are connected in a 'matrix' where one side of the switch goes to a common column connection and the other side to a common row connection. Then all you need is one connecting wire per row and one per column. If you think of a standard telephone keypad, there are 12 keys, 0-9 , # and *, so you would expect to need 24 wires, two per switch. By using a matrix it can be reduced down to three columns and four rows = 7 wires. The saving is even more as the matrix gets bigger. Instead of monitoring all the wires all the time, each row is sent a brief pulse of signal and all the columns are checked to see if any of them have that signal on them. If they have, it means the keyswitch where that row and column intersect has been pushed. Knowing which row had the signal at the time and which column connection responded lets the device work out which key it was.
It means you have to be a little cautious when working out how the switches and wires are used, it may be more complicated than each being wired individually.
Brian.