essay on the internet revolution

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11.2 The Evolution of the Internet

Learning objectives.

Define protocol and decentralization as they relate to the early Internet.
Identify technologies that made the Internet accessible.
Explain the causes and effects of the dot-com boom and crash.

From its early days as a military-only network to its current status as one of the developed world’s primary sources of information and communication, the Internet has come a long way in a short period of time. Yet there are a few elements that have stayed constant and that provide a coherent thread for examining the origins of the now-pervasive medium. The first is the persistence of the Internet—its Cold War beginnings necessarily influencing its design as a decentralized, indestructible communication network.

The second element is the development of rules of communication for computers that enable the machines to turn raw data into useful information. These rules, or protocols , have been developed through consensus by computer scientists to facilitate and control online communication and have shaped the way the Internet works. Facebook is a simple example of a protocol: Users can easily communicate with one another, but only through acceptance of protocols that include wall posts, comments, and messages. Facebook’s protocols make communication possible and control that communication.

These two elements connect the Internet’s origins to its present-day incarnation. Keeping them in mind as you read will help you comprehend the history of the Internet, from the Cold War to the Facebook era.

The History of the Internet

The near indestructibility of information on the Internet derives from a military principle used in secure voice transmission: decentralization . In the early 1970s, the RAND Corporation developed a technology (later called “packet switching”) that allowed users to send secure voice messages. In contrast to a system known as the hub-and-spoke model, where the telephone operator (the “hub”) would patch two people (the “spokes”) through directly, this new system allowed for a voice message to be sent through an entire network, or web, of carrier lines, without the need to travel through a central hub, allowing for many different possible paths to the destination.

During the Cold War, the U.S. military was concerned about a nuclear attack destroying the hub in its hub-and-spoke model; with this new web-like model, a secure voice transmission would be more likely to endure a large-scale attack. A web of data pathways would still be able to transmit secure voice “packets,” even if a few of the nodes—places where the web of connections intersected—were destroyed. Only through the destruction of all the nodes in the web could the data traveling along it be completely wiped out—an unlikely event in the case of a highly decentralized network.

This decentralized network could only function through common communication protocols. Just as we use certain protocols when communicating over a telephone—“hello,” “goodbye,” and “hold on for a minute” are three examples—any sort of machine-to-machine communication must also use protocols. These protocols constitute a shared language enabling computers to understand each other clearly and easily.

The Building Blocks of the Internet

In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began research on protocols to allow computers to communicate over a distributed network . This work paralleled work done by the RAND Corporation, particularly in the realm of a web-based network model of communication. Instead of using electronic signals to send an unending stream of ones and zeros over a line (the equivalent of a direct voice connection), DARPA used this new packet-switching technology to send small bundles of data. This way, a message that would have been an unbroken stream of binary data—extremely vulnerable to errors and corruption—could be packaged as only a few hundred numbers.

Figure 11.2

Centralized versus distributed communication networks

Imagine a telephone conversation in which any static in the signal would make the message incomprehensible. Whereas humans can infer meaning from “Meet me [static] the restaurant at 8:30” (we replace the static with the word at ), computers do not necessarily have that logical linguistic capability. To a computer, this constant stream of data is incomplete—or “corrupted,” in technological terminology—and confusing. Considering the susceptibility of electronic communication to noise or other forms of disruption, it would seem like computer-to-computer transmission would be nearly impossible.

However, the packets in this packet-switching technology have something that allows the receiving computer to make sure the packet has arrived uncorrupted. Because of this new technology and the shared protocols that made computer-to-computer transmission possible, a single large message could be broken into many pieces and sent through an entire web of connections, speeding up transmission and making that transmission more secure.

One of the necessary parts of a network is a host. A host is a physical node that is directly connected to the Internet and “directs traffic” by routing packets of data to and from other computers connected to it. In a normal network, a specific computer is usually not directly connected to the Internet; it is connected through a host. A host in this case is identified by an Internet protocol, or IP, address (a concept that is explained in greater detail later). Each unique IP address refers to a single location on the global Internet, but that IP address can serve as a gateway for many different computers. For example, a college campus may have one global IP address for all of its students’ computers, and each student’s computer might then have its own local IP address on the school’s network. This nested structure allows billions of different global hosts, each with any number of computers connected within their internal networks. Think of a campus postal system: All students share the same global address (1000 College Drive, Anywhere, VT 08759, for example), but they each have an internal mailbox within that system.

The early Internet was called ARPANET, after the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (which added “Defense” to its name and became DARPA in 1973), and consisted of just four hosts: UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. Now there are over half a million hosts, and each of those hosts likely serves thousands of people (Central Intelligence Agency). Each host uses protocols to connect to an ever-growing network of computers. Because of this, the Internet does not exist in any one place in particular; rather, it is the name we give to the huge network of interconnected computers that collectively form the entity that we think of as the Internet. The Internet is not a physical structure; it is the protocols that make this communication possible.

Figure 11.3

A TCP gateway is like a post office because of the way that it directs information to the correct location.

One of the other core components of the Internet is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) gateway. Proposed in a 1974 paper, the TCP gateway acts “like a postal service (Cerf, et. al., 1974).” Without knowing a specific physical address, any computer on the network can ask for the owner of any IP address, and the TCP gateway will consult its directory of IP address listings to determine exactly which computer the requester is trying to contact. The development of this technology was an essential building block in the interlinking of networks, as computers could now communicate with each other without knowing the specific address of a recipient; the TCP gateway would figure it all out. In addition, the TCP gateway checks for errors and ensures that data reaches its destination uncorrupted. Today, this combination of TCP gateways and IP addresses is called TCP/IP and is essentially a worldwide phone book for every host on the Internet.

You’ve Got Mail: The Beginnings of the Electronic Mailbox

E-mail has, in one sense or another, been around for quite a while. Originally, electronic messages were recorded within a single mainframe computer system. Each person working on the computer would have a personal folder, so sending that person a message required nothing more than creating a new document in that person’s folder. It was just like leaving a note on someone’s desk (Peter, 2004), so that the person would see it when he or she logged onto the computer.

However, once networks began to develop, things became slightly more complicated. Computer programmer Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing the naming system we have today, using the @ symbol to denote the server (or host, from the previous section). In other words, [email protected] tells the host “gmail.com” (Google’s e-mail server) to drop the message into the folder belonging to “name.” Tomlinson is credited with writing the first network e-mail using his program SNDMSG in 1971. This invention of a simple standard for e-mail is often cited as one of the most important factors in the rapid spread of the Internet, and is still one of the most widely used Internet services.

The use of e-mail grew in large part because of later commercial developments, especially America Online, that made connecting to e-mail much easier than it had been at its inception. Internet service providers (ISPs) packaged e-mail accounts with Internet access, and almost all web browsers (such as Netscape, discussed later in the section) included a form of e-mail service. In addition to the ISPs, e-mail services like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail provided free e-mail addresses paid for by small text ads at the bottom of every e-mail message sent. These free “webmail” services soon expanded to comprise a large part of the e-mail services that are available today. Far from the original maximum inbox sizes of a few megabytes, today’s e-mail services, like Google’s Gmail service, generally provide gigabytes of free storage space.

E-mail has revolutionized written communication. The speed and relatively inexpensive nature of e-mail makes it a prime competitor of postal services—including FedEx and UPS—that pride themselves on speed. Communicating via e-mail with someone on the other end of the world is just as quick and inexpensive as communicating with a next-door neighbor. However, the growth of Internet shopping and online companies such as Amazon.com has in many ways made the postal service and shipping companies more prominent—not necessarily for communication, but for delivery and remote business operations.

Hypertext: Web 1.0

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a graduate of Oxford University and software engineer at CERN (the European particle physics laboratory), had the idea of using a new kind of protocol to share documents and information throughout the local CERN network. Instead of transferring regular text-based documents, he created a new language called hypertext markup language (HTML). Hypertext was a new word for text that goes beyond the boundaries of a single document. Hypertext can include links to other documents (hyperlinks), text-style formatting, images, and a wide variety of other components. The basic idea is that documents can be constructed out of a variety of links and can be viewed just as if they are on the user’s computer.

This new language required a new communication protocol so that computers could interpret it, and Berners-Lee decided on the name hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). Through HTTP, hypertext documents can be sent from computer to computer and can then be interpreted by a browser, which turns the HTML files into readable web pages. The browser that Berners-Lee created, called World Wide Web, was a combination browser-editor, allowing users to view other HTML documents and create their own (Berners-Lee, 2009).

Figure 11.4

Tim Berners-Lee’s first web browser was also a web page editor.

Modern browsers, like Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, only allow for the viewing of web pages; other increasingly complicated tools are now marketed for creating web pages, although even the most complicated page can be written entirely from a program like Windows Notepad. The reason web pages can be created with the simplest tools is the adoption of certain protocols by the most common browsers. Because Internet Explorer, Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and other browsers all interpret the same code in more or less the same way, creating web pages is as simple as learning how to speak the language of these browsers.

In 1991, the same year that Berners-Lee created his web browser, the Internet connection service Q-Link was renamed America Online, or AOL for short. This service would eventually grow to employ over 20,000 people, on the basis of making Internet access available (and, critically, simple) for anyone with a telephone line. Although the web in 1991 was not what it is today, AOL’s software allowed its users to create communities based on just about any subject, and it only required a dial-up modem—a device that connects any computer to the Internet via a telephone line—and the telephone line itself.

In addition, AOL incorporated two technologies—chat rooms and Instant Messenger—into a single program (along with a web browser). Chat rooms allowed many users to type live messages to a “room” full of people, while Instant Messenger allowed two users to communicate privately via text-based messages. The most important aspect of AOL was its encapsulation of all these once-disparate programs into a single user-friendly bundle. Although AOL was later disparaged for customer service issues like its users’ inability to deactivate their service, its role in bringing the Internet to mainstream users was instrumental (Zeller Jr., 2005).

In contrast to AOL’s proprietary services, the World Wide Web had to be viewed through a standalone web browser. The first of these browsers to make its mark was the program Mosaic, released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Mosaic was offered for free and grew very quickly in popularity due to features that now seem integral to the web. Things like bookmarks, which allow users to save the location of particular pages without having to remember them, and images, now an integral part of the web, were all inventions that made the web more usable for many people (National Center for Supercomputing Appliances).

Although the web browser Mosaic has not been updated since 1997, developers who worked on it went on to create Netscape Navigator, an extremely popular browser during the 1990s. AOL later bought the Netscape company, and the Navigator browser was discontinued in 2008, largely because Netscape Navigator had lost the market to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser, which came preloaded on Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system. However, Netscape had long been converting its Navigator software into an open-source program called Mozilla Firefox, which is now the second-most-used web browser on the Internet (detailed in Table 11.1 “Browser Market Share (as of February 2010)” ) (NetMarketshare). Firefox represents about a quarter of the market—not bad, considering its lack of advertising and Microsoft’s natural advantage of packaging Internet Explorer with the majority of personal computers.

Table 11.1 Browser Market Share (as of February 2010)

For Sale: The Web

As web browsers became more available as a less-moderated alternative to AOL’s proprietary service, the web became something like a free-for-all of startup companies. The web of this period, often referred to as Web 1.0, featured many specialty sites that used the Internet’s ability for global, instantaneous communication to create a new type of business. Another name for this free-for-all of the 1990s is the “dot-com boom.” During the boom, it seemed as if almost anyone could build a website and sell it for millions of dollars. However, the “dot-com crash” that occurred later that decade seemed to say otherwise. Quite a few of these Internet startup companies went bankrupt, taking their shareholders down with them. Alan Greenspan, then the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, called this phenomenon “irrational exuberance (Greenspan, 1996),” in large part because investors did not necessarily know how to analyze these particular business plans, and companies that had never turned a profit could be sold for millions. The new business models of the Internet may have done well in the stock market, but they were not necessarily sustainable. In many ways, investors collectively failed to analyze the business prospects of these companies, and once they realized their mistakes (and the companies went bankrupt), much of the recent market growth evaporated. The invention of new technologies can bring with it the belief that old business tenets no longer apply, but this dangerous belief—the “irrational exuberance” Greenspan spoke of—is not necessarily conducive to long-term growth.

Some lucky dot-com businesses formed during the boom survived the crash and are still around today. For example, eBay, with its online auctions, turned what seemed like a dangerous practice (sending money to a stranger you met over the Internet) into a daily occurrence. A less-fortunate company, eToys.com , got off to a promising start—its stock quadrupled on the day it went public in 1999—but then filed for Chapter 11 “The Internet and Social Media” bankruptcy in 2001 (Barnes, 2001).

One of these startups, theGlobe.com , provided one of the earliest social networking services that exploded in popularity. When theGlobe.com went public, its stock shot from a target price of $9 to a close of $63.50 a share (Kawamoto, 1998). The site itself was started in 1995, building its business on advertising. As skepticism about the dot-com boom grew and advertisers became increasingly skittish about the value of online ads, theGlobe.com ceased to be profitable and shut its doors as a social networking site (The Globe, 2009). Although advertising is pervasive on the Internet today, the current model—largely based on the highly targeted Google AdSense service—did not come around until much later. In the earlier dot-com years, the same ad might be shown on thousands of different web pages, whereas now advertising is often specifically targeted to the content of an individual page.

However, that did not spell the end of social networking on the Internet. Social networking had been going on since at least the invention of Usenet in 1979 (detailed later in the chapter), but the recurring problem was always the same: profitability. This model of free access to user-generated content departed from almost anything previously seen in media, and revenue streams would have to be just as radical.

The Early Days of Social Media

The shared, generalized protocols of the Internet have allowed it to be easily adapted and extended into many different facets of our lives. The Internet shapes everything, from our day-to-day routine—the ability to read newspapers from around the world, for example—to the way research and collaboration are conducted. There are three important aspects of communication that the Internet has changed, and these have instigated profound changes in the way we connect with one another socially: the speed of information, the volume of information, and the “democratization” of publishing, or the ability of anyone to publish ideas on the web.

One of the Internet’s largest and most revolutionary changes has come about through social networking. Because of Twitter, we can now see what all our friends are doing in real time; because of blogs, we can consider the opinions of complete strangers who may never write in traditional print; and because of Facebook, we can find people we haven’t talked to for decades, all without making a single awkward telephone call.

Recent years have seen an explosion of new content and services; although the phrase “social media” now seems to be synonymous with websites like Facebook and Twitter, it is worthwhile to consider all the ways a social media platform affects the Internet experience.

How Did We Get Here? The Late 1970s, Early 1980s, and Usenet

Almost as soon as TCP stitched the various networks together, a former DARPA scientist named Larry Roberts founded the company Telnet, the first commercial packet-switching company. Two years later, in 1977, the invention of the dial-up modem (in combination with the wider availability of personal computers like the Apple II) made it possible for anyone around the world to access the Internet. With availability extended beyond purely academic and military circles, the Internet quickly became a staple for computer hobbyists.

One of the consequences of the spread of the Internet to hobbyists was the founding of Usenet. In 1979, University of North Carolina graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis connected three computers in a small network and used a series of programming scripts to post and receive messages. In a very short span of time, this system spread all over the burgeoning Internet. Much like an electronic version of community bulletin boards, anyone with a computer could post a topic or reply on Usenet.

The group was fundamentally and explicitly anarchic, as outlined by the posting “What is Usenet?” This document says, “Usenet is not a democracy…there is no person or group in charge of Usenet …Usenet cannot be a democracy, autocracy, or any other kind of ‘-acy (Moraes, et. al., 1998).’” Usenet was not used only for socializing, however, but also for collaboration. In some ways, the service allowed a new kind of collaboration that seemed like the start of a revolution: “I was able to join rec.kites and collectively people in Australia and New Zealand helped me solve a problem and get a circular two-line kite to fly,” one user told the United Kingdom’s Guardian (Jeffery, et. al., 2009).

GeoCities: Yahoo! Pioneers

Fast-forward to 1995: The president and founder of Beverly Hills Internet, David Bohnett, announces that the name of his company is now “GeoCities.” GeoCities built its business by allowing users (“homesteaders”) to create web pages in “communities” for free, with the stipulation that the company placed a small advertising banner at the top of each page. Anyone could register a GeoCities site and subsequently build a web page about a topic. Almost all of the community names, like Broadway (live theater) and Athens (philosophy and education), were centered on specific topics (Archive, 1996).

This idea of centering communities on specific topics may have come from Usenet. In Usenet, the domain alt.rec.kites refers to a specific topic (kites) within a category (recreation) within a larger community (alternative topics). This hierarchical model allowed users to organize themselves across the vastness of the Internet, even on a large site like GeoCities. The difference with GeoCities was that it allowed users to do much more than post only text (the limitation of Usenet), while constraining them to a relatively small pool of resources. Although each GeoCities user had only a few megabytes of web space, standardized pictures—like mailbox icons and back buttons—were hosted on GeoCities’s main server. GeoCities was such a large part of the Internet, and these standard icons were so ubiquitous, that they have now become a veritable part of the Internet’s cultural history. The Web Elements category of the site Internet Archaeology is a good example of how pervasive GeoCities graphics became (Internet Archaeology, 2010).

GeoCities built its business on a freemium model, where basic services are free but subscribers pay extra for things like commercial pages or shopping carts. Other Internet businesses, like Skype and Flickr, use the same model to keep a vast user base while still profiting from frequent users. Since loss of online advertising revenue was seen as one of the main causes of the dot-com crash, many current web startups are turning toward this freemium model to diversify their income streams (Miller, 2009).

GeoCities’s model was so successful that the company Yahoo! bought it for $3.6 billion at its peak in 1999. At the time, GeoCities was the third-most-visited site on the web (behind Yahoo! and AOL), so it seemed like a sure bet. A decade later, on October 26, 2009, Yahoo! closed GeoCities for good in every country except Japan.

Diversification of revenue has become one of the most crucial elements of Internet businesses; from The Wall Street Journal online to YouTube, almost every website is now looking for multiple income streams to support its services.

Key Takeaways

The two primary characteristics of the original Internet were decentralization and free, open protocols that anyone could use. As a result of its decentralized “web” model of organization, the Internet can store data in many different places at once. This makes it very useful for backing up data and very difficult to destroy data that might be unwanted. Protocols play an important role in this, because they allow some degree of control to exist without a central command structure.
Two of the most important technological developments were the personal computer (such as the Apple II) and the dial-up modem, which allowed anyone with a phone line to access the developing Internet. America Online also played an important role, making it very easy for practically anyone with a computer to use the Internet. Another development, the web browser, allowed for access to and creation of web pages all over the Internet.
With the advent of the web browser, it seemed as if anyone could make a website that people wanted to use. The problem was that these sites were driven largely by venture capital and grossly inflated initial public offerings of their stock. After failing to secure any real revenue stream, their stock plummeted, the market crashed, and many of these companies went out of business. In later years, companies tried to diversify their investments, particularly by using a “freemium” model of revenue, in which a company would both sell premium services and advertise, while offering a free pared-down service to casual users.

Websites have many different ways of paying for themselves, and this can say a lot about both the site and its audience. The business models of today’s websites may also directly reflect the lessons learned during the early days of the Internet. Start this exercise by reviewing a list of common ways that websites pay for themselves, how they arrived at these methods, and what it might say about them:

Advertising: The site probably has many casual viewers and may not necessarily be well established. If there are targeted ads (such as ads directed toward stay-at-home parents with children), then it is possible the site is successful with a small audience.
Subscription option: The site may be a news site that prides itself on accuracy of information or lack of bias, whose regular readers are willing to pay a premium for the guarantee of quality material. Alternately, the site may cater to a small demographic of Internet users by providing them with exclusive, subscription-only content.
Selling services: Online services, such as file hosting, or offline services and products are probably the clearest way to determine a site’s revenue stream. However, these commercial sites often are not prized for their unbiased information, and their bias can greatly affect the content on the site.

Choose a website that you visit often, and list which of these revenue streams the site might have. How might this affect the content on the site? Is there a visible effect, or does the site try to hide it? Consider how events during the early history of the Internet may have affected the way the site operates now. Write down a revenue stream that the site does not currently have and how the site designers might implement such a revenue stream.

Archive, While GeoCities is no longer in business, the Internet Archive maintains the site at http://www.archive.org/web/geocities.php . Information taken from December 21, 1996.

Barnes, Cecily. “eToys files for Chapter 11,” CNET , March 7, 2001, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-253706.html .

Berners-Lee, Tim. “The WorldWideWeb Browser,” 2009, https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb .

Central Intelligence Agency, “Country Comparison: Internet Hosts,” World Factbook , https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2184rank.html .

Cerf, Vincton, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, “Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program,” December 1974, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc675 .

Greenspan, Alan. “The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society, ” (lecture, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, DC, December 5, 1996), http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1996/19961205.htm .

Internet Archaeology, 2010, http://www.internetarchaeology.org/swebelements.htm .

Jeffery, Simon and others, “A People’s History of the Internet: From Arpanet in 1969 to Today,” Guardian (London), October 23, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/interactive/2009/oct/23/internet-arpanet .

Kawamoto, Dawn. “ TheGlobe.com ’s IPO one for the books,” CNET , November 13, 1998, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-217913.html .

Miller, Claire Cain. “Ad Revenue on the Web? No Sure Bet,” New York Times , May 24, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/technology/start-ups/25startup.html .

Moraes, Mark, Chip Salzenberg, and Gene Spafford, “What is Usenet?” December 28, 1999, http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/what-is/part1/ .

National Center for Supercomputing Appliances, “About NCSA Mosaic,” 2010, http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/Projects/mosaic.html .

NetMarketShare, “Browser Market Share,” http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcal=1&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=132 .

Peter, Ian. “The History of Email,” The Internet History Project, 2004, http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/email.html .

The Globe, theglobe.com, “About Us,” 2009, http://www.theglobe.com/ .

Zeller, Jr., Tom. “Canceling AOL? Just Offer Your Firstborn,” New York Times , August 29, 2005, all http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/technology/29link.html .

Understanding Media and Culture Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

The Internet Revolution and Digital Future Technology Essay

Introduction, history and timeline of digital technology, the social-economic impacts of digital revolution, challenges of digital revolution, reference list.

Digital Revolution refers to the change in technology that has been going on in the last 40 years, from analog technology and mechanical technology to digital technology. It has been characterized by rapid developments in information technology.

Computers have become faster, cheaper, more powerful, and smaller. Consequently, information technology has become part and parcel of lives as it is embedded in almost all the products. People are adjusting very fast to the rapid pace at which the environment is changing. That is why this essay explores the internet revolution and digital future technology.

Of course, other developments have been realized. As far as this digital revolution essay is concerned, such innovations include television, mobile phones, the world wide web, online social networking, virtual communities, music, and multimedia. So, the following essay covers the issues relating to the revolution of information and the challenges that hinder the effective development of digital technology.

The invention of personal compute in the mid 20 th century enhanced the invention of new technologies by converging the previous analog technology to digital format. This made it possible to make identical copies of the original and hence the ability of accessing and distributing information remotely between media.

A significant development as far as the digital revolution is concerned is the transition of music from analog to recorded digital one in they early 1980s (Hoare,1998).

The whole phenomenon behind digital revolution started with the invention of a transistor which in turn facilitated the invention of a microprocessor. The microprocessor saw the development of the personal computers and it was the invention of the personal computers that paved way for other digital devices that are present today.

The transistor that facilitated the invention of digital computers was invented in 1947 and so the computers came onto being in the mid 1950s and it was only the government, military and the organizations that had the computer systems. As a result of digital computers invention, the World Wide Web was created.

The personal computers were later invented in the 1970s in which the time sharing between computers was effectively realized.

The general public became familiar with the computers in the 1980s in the industrialized nations such as U.S, Germany, France among others. Thus people bought the computers for home and business use. Many people became conversant with the computers and also many jobs were created as a result. It is also in the 1980s that the first cell phone was created by Motorola (Creeber & Martin, 2008).

The period between 1990s and 2000 was also characterized by significant developments in the digital era. First, the internet was released by the World Wide Web and so many businesses had the chance of advertising themselves.

People from the developed nations were the first beneficiary of internet invention but the digital revolution eventually spread to the entire globe in 1990s implying that even people from the developing countries had the access to internet. The cell phone was also developed in this era but much later which had the effect of enhancing communication among people.

The revolution of digital technology has had both positive as well as negative impact as far as social and economic aspects are concerned. The positive impacts of the revolution of the digital technology include the fact that it has enhanced interconnectedness among people.

The interconnectedness has reduced costs and time as far as sending and receiving the information is concerned. In the past, people used to spend much money in an order to convey information (Hofstede, 1997).

The digital technology has also made information to be easily accessible unlike in the past and this have resulted to great efficiency in organizations and hence enabling them to achieve their objectives. The World Wide Web has been of much assistance as it has facilitated the outsourcing by the companies and hence enhancing interaction between the companies.

The new innovations have also brought about economic growth through globalization whereby one can even buy and sell products online without necessarily having to travel long distances in order to carry out negotiations and so everyday life of people have been made easier.

Electronic commerce as a result of internet allows efficiency on the consumer’s prices for goods and services because middlemen which have the effect of increasing the prices are eliminated as the supplier is able to sell his or her goods directly to the consumers.

The negative effects as a result of revolution of digital technology includes the fact that the companies’ productivity is often reduced as employees spends much time pursuing their own interests using the digital devices that are found in the workplace e.g. playing computer games, chatting on the social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter, accessing emails etc.

The other negative impact as far as the revolution of digital technology is concerned is that there is less privacy because the information that is stored in the digital devices is susceptible to be accessed by people who were not intended to view it.

Some of the information that is found in they internet for instance may not be suitable for people of all ages such as underage as it have unethical elements such as pornography etc. due to the fact that organizations as well as individuals are allowed to publish any topic whatsoever to the world at large at minimal costs (World Culture Report, 1998).

This has been a major concern for many parents as the students performance in schools continue to deteriorate because they spends much of their time either listening to music with their iPods, downloading music, watching movies and video clips etc. instead of concentrating in their studies (Creeber & Martin, 2008).

There has also been an increase in frauds as far as the revolution in digital technology is concerned e.g. the cyber crime with the World Wide Web which has resulted to huge losses among the victims (Vikas, 2002).

The path towards digital revolution has not been all smooth as it has been met with challenges and the main one being digital divide (Challoner & Gribbin, 2002). The gap between those who have access to information technology and those who do not have is quite wide and this has made the revolution in digital technology not to be uniform because there are societies that continues to lag behind and resulting into digital divide.

The digital divide occurs mainly in the low developed nations with many people being unaware of the current digital technologies and so the revolution process cannot be carried out effectively as the people behind revolution cannot be able to get feedback on the existing products.

Another challenge that is common in the digital revolution is the rate at which the evolution takes place implying that ones digital gadgets as well as programs are always at a risk of becoming obsolete due to the revolution of more effective ones and hence a person will be required to seek for the digital devices that are currently in use which is a bit costly (Hofstede, 1997).

There are also concerns about trademarks and copyrights as a result of revolution of the digital technology as consumers have resulted to duplicating the original protected works instead of purchasing the original product from the manufacturers. The music and film industry is the one that has been greatly affected by these violations. This has in turn led to the killing of the morale of the original manufacturers.

The emergence of counterfeit products in the market have also made it hard for the consumers both differentiate between the original products and the fake ones and this have the effect of hindering the product innovation

The digital revolution have spurred economic growth as a result of the innovations and with the personal computers advent, information management about products, people and processes became crucial in each and every sector of the economy. The mere convergence of communication, computing and the content enhanced the digital revolution as well as digital economy.

In today’s world, societies have adequate infrastructure concerning information and communication technology as revolution still continues and thus reaping benefits as a result of the advancement in technology.

As competition increases in businesses, innovation is being considered as the key factor for success and so there is need to encourage the under developed nations to be innovative enough so that they can be able to compete effectively with the developed nations (Hofstede, 1997).

Challoner, J. & Gribbin, J (2002). The Digital Revolution . London: DK Pub.

Creeber, G. & Martin, R. (2008). Digital cultures . London: Open University Press.

Hoare, S. (1998). Digital Revolution: 20th century inventions . Whyman: Raintree Steck-Vaughn.

Hofstede, G. (1997). Culture and Organizations Software of the Mind . New York: McGraw Hill.

Vikas, M. (2002). Annals of Indian Language Computing: Goa International . UK: Conference on Universal Knowledge and Language.

World Culture Report. (1998). Culture, Creativity and Markets . US: UNESCO.

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A short history of the internet

Published: 3 December 2020

Read about the history of the internet, from its 1950s origins to the World Wide Web’s explosion in popularity in the late 1990s and the ‘dotcom bubble’.

The origins of the internet

The origins of the internet are rooted in the USA of the 1950s. The Cold War was at its height and huge tensions existed between North America and the Soviet Union. Both superpowers were in possession of deadly nuclear weapons, and people lived in fear of long-range surprise attacks. The US realised it needed a communications system that could not be affected by a Soviet nuclear attack.

At this time, computers were large, expensive machines exclusively used by military scientists and university staff.

These machines were powerful but limited in numbers, and researchers grew increasingly frustrated: they required access to the technology, but had to travel great distances to use it.

To solve this problem, researchers started ‘time-sharing’. This meant that users could simultaneously access a mainframe computer through a series of terminals, although individually they had only a fraction of the computer’s actual power at their command.

The difficulty of using such systems led various scientists, engineers and organisations to research the possibility of a large-scale computer network.

Who invented the internet?

No one person invented the internet. When networking technology was first developed, a number of scientists and engineers brought their research together to create the ARPANET . Later, other inventors’ creations paved the way for the web as we know it today.

• PAUL BARAN (1926–2011)

An engineer whose work overlapped with ARPA’s research. In 1959 he joined an American think tank, the RAND Corporation, and was asked to research how the US Air Force could keep control of its fleet if a nuclear attack ever happened. In 1964 Baran proposed a communication network with no central command point. If one point was destroyed, all surviving points would still be able to communicate with each other. He called this a distributed network.

• LAWRENCE ROBERTS (1937–2018)

Chief scientist at ARPA, responsible for developing computer networks. Paul Baran’s idea appealed to Roberts, and he began to work on the creation of a distributed network.

• LEONARD KLEINROCK (1934–)

An American scientist who worked towards the creation of a distributed network alongside Lawrence Roberts.

• DONALD DAVIES (1924–2000)

A British scientist who, at the same time as Roberts and Kleinrock, was developing similar technology at the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex.

• BOB KAHN (1938–) AND VINT CERF (1943–)

American computer scientists who developed TCP/IP , the set of protocols that governs how data moves through a network. This helped the ARPANET evolve into the internet we use today. Vint Cerf is credited with the first written use of the word ‘internet’.

When asked to explain my role in the creation of the internet, I generally use the example of a city. I helped to build the roads—the infrastructure that gets things from point A to point B. —Vint Cerf, 2007

• PAUL MOCKAPETRIS (1948–) AND JON POSTEL (1943–98)

Inventors of DNS , the ‘phone book of the internet’.

• TIM BERNERS-LEE (1955–)

Creator of the World Wide Web who developed many of the principles we still use today, such as HTML, HTTP, URLs and web browsers.

There was no “Eureka!” moment. It was not like the legendary apple falling on Newton’s head to demonstrate the concept of gravity. Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realisation that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way. And that awareness came to me through precisely that kind of process. The Web arose as the answer to an open challenge, through the swirling together of influences, ideas, and realisations from many sides. —Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web , 1999

• MARC ANDREESSEN (1971–)

Inventor of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser.

The first use of a computer network

In 1965, Lawrence Roberts made two separate computers in different places ‘talk’ to each other for the first time. This experimental link used a telephone line with an acoustically coupled modem, and transferred digital data using packets.

When the first packet-switching network was developed, Leonard Kleinrock was the first person to use it to send a message. He used a computer at UCLA to send a message to a computer at Stanford. Kleinrock tried to type ‘login’ but the system crashed after the letters ‘L’ and ‘O’ had appeared on the Stanford monitor.

A second attempt proved successful and more messages were exchanged between the two sites. The ARPANET was born.

The life and death of the ARPANET

President Dwight D. Eisenhower formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958, bringing together some of the best scientific minds in the country. Their aim was to help American military technology stay ahead of its enemies and prevent surprises, such as the launch of the satellite Sputnik 1, happening again. Among ARPA’s projects was a remit to test the feasibility of a large-scale computer network.

Lawrence Roberts was responsible for developing computer networks at ARPA, working with scientist Leonard Kleinrock. Roberts was the first person to connect two computers. When the first packet-switching network was developed in 1969, Kleinrock successfully used it to send messages to another site, and the ARPA Network—or ARPANET—was born.

Once ARPANET was up and running, it quickly expanded. By 1973, 30 academic, military and research institutions had joined the network, connecting locations including Hawaii, Norway and the UK.

As ARPANET grew, a set of rules for handling data packets needed to be put in place. In 1974, computer scientists Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf invented a new method called transmission-control protocol, popularly known as TCP/IP , which essentially allowed computers to speak the same language.

After the introduction of TCP/IP, ARPANET quickly grew to become a global interconnected network of networks, or ‘Internet’.

The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.

What is packet switching?

‘Packet switching’ is a method of splitting and sending data. A computer file is effectively broken up into thousands of small segments called ‘packets’—each typically around 1500 bytes—distributed across a network, and then reordered back into a single file at their destination. The packet switching method is very reliable and allows data to be sent securely, even over damaged networks; it also uses bandwidth very efficiently and doesn’t need a single dedicated link, like a telephone call does.

The world’s first packet-switching computer network was produced in 1969. Computers at four American universities were connected using separate minicomputers known as ‘Interface Message Processors’ or ‘IMPs’. The IMPs acted as gateways for the packets and have since evolved into what we now call ‘routers’.

Packet switching is the basis on which the internet still works today.

What is TCP/IP?

TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. The term is used to describe a set of protocols that govern how data moves through a network.

After the creation of ARPANET, more networks of computers began to join the network, and the need arose for an agreed set of rules for handling data. In 1974 two American computer scientists, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, proposed a new method that involved sending data packets in a digital envelope or ‘datagram’. The address on the datagram can be read by any computer, but only the final host machine can open the envelope and read the message inside.

Kahn and Cerf called this method transmission-control protocol (TCP). TCP allowed computers to speak the same language, and it helped the ARPANET to grow into a global interconnected network of networks, an example of ‘internetworking’—internet for short.

IP stands for Internet Protocol and, when combined with TCP, helps internet traffic find its destination. Every device connected to the internet is given a unique IP number. Known as an IP address, the number can be used to find the location of any internet-connected device in the world.

What is DNS?

DNS stands for Domain Name System. It is the internet’s equivalent of a phone book, and converts hard-to-remember IP addresses into simple names.

In the early 1980s, cheaper technology and the appearance of desktop computers allowed the rapid development of local area networks (LANs). An increase in the amount of computers on the network made it difficult to keep track of all the different IP addresses.

This problem was solved by the introduction of the Domain Name System (DNS) in 1983. DNS was invented by Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel at the University of Southern California. It was one of the innovations that paved the way for the World Wide Web.

The beginnings of email

Email was a rapid—but unintended—consequence of the growth of ARPANET. As the network increased in popularity and scope, users quickly realised the potential of the network as a tool for sending messages between different ARPANET computers.

Ray Tomlinson , an American computer programmer, is responsible for electronic mail as we know it today. He introduced the idea that the destination of a message should be indicated using the @ symbol, which was first used to distinguish between the individual user’s name and that of their computer (i.e. user@computer). When DNS was introduced, this was extended to [email protected] .

Early email users sent personal messages and began mailing lists on specific topics. One of the first big mailing lists was ‘SF-LOVERS’ for science fiction fans.

The development of email showed how the network had transformed. Rather than a way of accessing expensive computing power, it had started to become a place to communicate, gossip and make friends.

Early home computers

From the 1970s onwards, the home computer industry grew exponentially. The uptake of home computers was not necessarily driven by users’ needs or a computer’s functionality; early machines could actually do relatively little. The appeal to the consumer was the idea of becoming part of the ‘Information Revolution’. Computers were embedded with the rhetoric of the future and learning, but in most cases this meant learning to program so that people could actually make the technology do something, such as play games.

More information about collection object

The growth of the internet, 1985–95.

The invention of DNS, the common use of TCP/IP and the popularity of email caused an explosion of activity on the internet. Between 1986 and 1987, the network grew from 2,000 hosts to 30,000. People were now using the internet to send messages to each other, read news and swap files. However, advanced knowledge of computing was still needed to dial in to the system and use it effectively, and there was still no agreement on the way that documents on the network were formatted.

The internet needed to be easier to use. An answer to the problem appeared in 1989 when a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to his employer, CERN, the international particle-research laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee proposed a new way of structuring and linking all the information available on CERN’s computer network that made it quick and easy to access. His concept for a ‘web of information’ would ultimately become the World Wide Web.

The launch of the Mosaic browser in 1993 opened up the web to a new audience of non-academics, and people started to discover how easy it was to create their own HTML web pages. Consequently, the number of websites grew from 130 in 1993 to over 100,000 at the start of 1996.

By 1995 the internet and the World Wide Web were established phenomena: Netscape Navigator, which was the most popular browser at the time, had around 10 million global users.

How is the World Wide Web different from the internet?

The terms ‘World Wide Web’ and ‘internet’ are often confused. The internet is the networking infrastructure that connects devices together, while the World Wide Web is a way of accessing information through the medium of the internet.

Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of a ‘web of information’ in 1989. It relied on ‘hyperlinks’ to connect documents together. Written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a hyperlink can point to any other HTML page or file that sits on top of the internet.

In 1990, Berners-Lee developed Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and designed the Universal Resource Identifier (URI) system. HTTP is the language computers use to communicate HTML documents over the internet, and the URI, also known as a URL, provides a unique address where the pages can be easily found.

Berners-Lee also created a piece of software that could present HTML documents in an easy-to-read format. He called this ‘browser’ the ‘WorldWideWeb’.

Birthplace of the Web (the computer that Tim Berners-Lee used to invent the World Wide Web)

On 6 August 1991 the code to create more web pages and the software to view them was made freely available on the internet. Computer enthusiasts around the world began setting up their own websites. Berners-Lee’s vision of a free, global and shared information space began to take shape.

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. Tim Berners-Lee (1998)

The introduction of web browsers

Tim Berners-Lee was the first to create a piece of software that could present HTML documents in an easy-to-read format. He called this ‘browser’ the ‘WorldWideWeb’. However, this original application had limited use as it could only be used on advanced NeXT machines . A simplified version that could run on any computer was created by Nicola Pellow, a maths student who worked alongside Berners-Lee at CERN.

In 1993, Marc Andreessen, an American student in Illinois, launched a new browser called Mosaic. Created at the National Center for Super-computing Applications (NCSA), Mosaic was easy to download and install, worked on many different computers and provided simple point-and-click access to the World Wide Web. Mosaic was also the first browser to display images next to text, rather than in a separate window.

Mosaic’s simplicity opened the web up to a new audience, and caused an explosion of activity on the internet, with the number of websites growing from 130 in 1993 to over 100,000 at the start of 1996.

In 1994 Andreesen formed Netscape Communications with entrepreneur Jim Clark. They led the company to create Netscape Navigator, a widely used internet browser that at the time was faster and more sophisticated than any of the competition. By 1995, Navigator had around 10 million global users.

Early ecommerce and the ‘dotcom bubble’

The enormous excitement surrounding the internet led to a massive boom in new technology shares between 1998 and 2000. This became known as the ‘dotcom bubble’.

The claim was that world industry was experiencing a ‘new economic paradigm’, the likes of which had never been experienced before. Investors in the stock market began to believe the hype and threw themselves into a frenzy of activity. The internet was thought to be central to economic growth, while share prices implied that new online companies carried the seeds for expansion. This led in turn to a feverish level of investment and unrealistic expectations about rates of return.

We have entered a period of sustained growth that could eventually double the world’s economy every dozen years and bring increasing prosperity for—quite literally—billions of people on the planet. We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions throughout the world. —Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, Wired , July 1997

Venture capitalists flourished and many companies were founded on dubious business plans. The most notorious of these was the high fashion online retailer Boo.com, which spent its way through $200 million, only to collapse within six months of its website going live.

However, despite their failure, such businesses helped cause a fundamental transformation and left an important legacy. Many investors lost money, but they also helped to finance the new system and lay the groundwork for future success in ecommerce.

The first digital photos, from Victorian technology to the internet

Read about the first experiments in digital image technology—which took place longer ago than you might think.

Investigate the development of calculating, computing and data processing technology.

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A Brief History of Computing pp 237–255 Cite as

The Internet Revolution

Gerard O’Regan 2
First Online: 29 April 2021

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This chapter describes the Internet revolution starting from ARPANET, which was a packet-switched network to TCP/IP, which is a set of network standards for interconnecting networks and computers. These developments led to the birth of the Internet, and Tim Berners-Lee’s work at CERN led to the birth of the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee built on several existing inventions such as the Internet, hypertext, and the mouse to form the World Wide Web. Applications of the World Wide Web as well as successful and unsuccessful new economy companies are discussed. The dot com bubble and subsequent burst of the late 1990s/early 2000 are discussed.

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Licklider was an early pioneer of AI and wrote an influential paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis” in 1960 [ Lic:60 ], which outlined the need for simple interaction between users and computers.

BBN Technologies (originally Bolt Beranek and Newman) is a research and development technology company. It played an important role in the development of packet switching and in the implementation and operation of ARPANET. The “@” sign used in an email address was a BBN innovation.

Packet switching is a message communication system between computers. Long messages are split into packets, which are then sent separately to minimize the risk of congestion.

The origin of the term “Trojan Horse” is from Homer’s Illiad and concerns the Greek victory in the Trojan war. The Greek hero Odysseus and others hid in a wooden horse while the other Greeks sailed away from Troy. This led the Trojans to believe that the Greeks had abandoned their attack and were returning to their homeland leading behind a farewell gift for the citizens of Troy. The Trojans brought the wooden horse into the city, and later that night Odysseus and his companions opened the gates of Troy to the returning Greeks, leading to the mass slaughter of its citizens. Hence the phrase “ Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. ” Troy was located at the mouth of the Dardanelles in Turkey.

Weaving the Web. Tim Berners-Lee. Collins Book. 2000.

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The internet: History, evolution and how it works

The Internet is a massive computer network that has revolutionized communication and changed the world forever.

What is the internet?

Internet invention
How it works

How do websites work?

Speed and bandwidth

Additional resources

Bibliography.

The internet is a vast network that connects computers across the world via more than 750,000 miles (1,200,000 kilometres) of cable running under land and sea, according to the University of Colorado Boulder.

It is the world's fastest method of communication, making it possible to send data from London, U.K. to Sydney, Australia in just 250 milliseconds, for example. Constructing and maintaining the internet has been a monumental feat of ingenuity.

The internet is a giant computer network, linking billions of machines together by underground and underwater fibre-optic cables.These cables run connect continents and islands , everywhere except Antarctica

Each cable contains strands of glass that transmit data as pulses of light, according to the journal Science . Those strands are wrapped in layers of insulation and buried beneath the sea floor by ships carrying specialist ploughs. This helps to protect them from everything from corrosion to shark bites.

When you use it, your computer or device sends messages via these cables asking to access data stored on other machines. When accessing the internet, most people will be using the world wide web.

When was the internet invented?

It was originally created by the U.S. government during the Cold War . In 1958, President Eisenhower founded the Advanced Research Projects Agency ( ARPA ) to give a boost to the country’s military technology, according to the Journal of Cyber Policy . Scientists and engineers developed a network of linked computers called ARPANET.

- The Internet of Things: A seamless network of everyday objects

- What is cyberwarfare?

- Internet history timeline: ARPANET to the World Wide Web

ARPANET's original aim was to link two computers in different places, enabling them to share data. That dream became a reality in 1969, according to Historian Jeremy Norman . In the years that followed, the team linked dozens of computers together and, by the end of the 1980s, the network contained more than 30,000 machines, according to the U.K.'s Science and Media Museum .

How the onternet works

Most computers connect to the internet without the use of wires, using Wi-Fi , via a physical modem. It connects via a wire to a socket in the wall, which links to a box outside. That box connects via still more wires to a network of cables under the ground. Together, they convert radio waves to electrical signals to fibre optic pulses, and back again.

At every connection point in the underground network, there are junction boxes called routers. Their job is to work out the best way to pass data from your computer to the computer with which you’re trying to connect. According to the IEEE International Conference on Communications , they use your IP addresses to work out where the data should go. Latency is the technical word that describes how long it takes data to get from one place to another, according to Frontier .

Each router is only connected to its local network. If a message arrives for a computer that the router doesn’t recognizse, it passes it on to a router higher up in the local network. They each maintain an address book called a routing table . According to the Internet Protocol Journal , it shows the paths through the network to all the local IP addresses.

The internet sends data around the world, across land and sea, as displayed on the Submarine Cable Map . The data passes between networks until it reaches the one closest to its destination. Then, it passes through local routers until it arrives at the computer with the matching IP address.

The internet relies upon the two connecting computers speaking the same digital language. To achieve this, there is a set of rules called the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), according to the web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare .

TCP/IP makes the internet work a bit like a postal system. There is an address book that contains the identity of every device on the network, and a set of standard envelopes for packaging up data. The envelopes must carry the address of the sender, the address of the recipient, and details about the information packed inside. The IP, explains how the address system works, whileTCP, how to package and send the data.

Click the numbers on the following interactive image to find out what happens when you type www.livescience.com into your browser:

Internet speed and bandwidth

When it comes to internet speed how much data you can download in one second: bandwidth. According to Tom’s Guide , to surf the web, check your email, and update your social media, 25 megabits per second is enough. But, if you want to watch 4K movies, live stream video, or play online multiplayer games, you might need speeds of up to 100-200 megabits per second.

Your download speed depends on one main factor: the quality of the underground cables that link you to the rest of the world. Fibre optic cables send data much faster than their copper counterparts, according to the cable testing company BASEC , and your home internet is limited by the infrastructure available in your area.

Jersey has the highest average bandwidth in the world, according to Cable.co.uk . The little British island off the coast of France boasts average download speeds of over 274 megabits per second. Turkmenistan has the lowest, with download speeds barely reaching 0.5 megabits per second.

You can read more about the history of the internet at the Internet Society website . To discover how the Internet has changed our daily lives, read this article by Computing Australia .

" Getting to the bottom of the internet’s carbon footprint ". University of Colorado Boulder, College of Media, Communication and Information (2021).
" The evolution of the Internet: from military experiment to General Purpose Technology ". Journal of Cyber Policy (2016).
" The Internet: Past, Present, and Future ". Educational Technology (1997).
" Three-Way Handshake ". CISSP Study Guide (Second Edition) (2012).
" Content Routers: Fetching Data on Network Path ". IEEE International Conference on Communications (2011).
" Analyzing the Internet's BGP Routing Table ". The Internet Protocol Journal (2001).
" The Internet of Tomorrow ". Science (1999).

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Essay on Internet Revolution

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100 Words Essay on Internet Revolution

What is the internet revolution.

The Internet Revolution is a big change in how we share information and communicate. It started when computers got connected across the world. This made it easy for people to talk to each other, learn new things, and do business no matter where they were.

Changes in Communication

Before the internet, we sent letters or used the phone. Now, we can send messages, pictures, and videos instantly online. This has made talking to friends and family, even in far places, very simple.

Learning and Information

The internet is like a giant library that never closes. You can find facts about anything at any time. Schoolwork and learning have become more fun and interactive because of the internet.

Business and Shopping

Buying and selling things has changed too. You can buy a toy or clothes from your home and have them delivered to your door. Companies use the internet to sell products all over the world.

Entertainment

Games, music, and movies are now online. You can enjoy your favorite show or play games with people from different countries without leaving your room. The internet has made fun things easy to get to.

250 Words Essay on Internet Revolution

The Internet Revolution is a big change in how we share information and communicate with each other. Before the internet, people used to talk on the phone, write letters, or meet in person to share news and ideas. Now, we can send messages, pictures, and videos across the world in seconds through the internet.

Changing How We Learn and Work

The internet has made learning and working very different. Students can find facts, watch educational videos, and even go to school online. For work, many people can do their jobs from home using the internet. This is helpful because it saves time and lets people be with their families more.

Connecting People

One of the best things about the internet is how it connects people. You can make new friends, talk to family far away, and join groups with people who like the same things as you. It’s like a big community that is open all the time.

Entertainment for Everyone

Entertainment is also a big part of the internet. You can watch movies, listen to music, and play games anytime you want. It’s easy to find something fun to do on the internet.

In conclusion, the Internet Revolution has changed our lives in many ways. It makes learning, working, and having fun different and often easier. It connects us to the whole world, and that’s why it’s a very important part of our daily lives.

500 Words Essay on Internet Revolution

The Internet Revolution is a big change that has happened in the world because of the internet. The internet is like a huge spider web that connects computers all over the planet. This web lets people talk to each other, find information, and share things with anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Changing the Way We Talk

Before the internet, people used letters, phones, or face-to-face meetings to talk to each other. Now, with the internet, we can send messages, pictures, and videos across the world in seconds. Apps like WhatsApp, email, and social media sites like Facebook have made it easy for everyone to stay in touch with friends and family.

Learning and School

The internet has also changed how we learn. In the past, you had to go to a library and read books to get information. Now, you can find almost anything online. Websites like Wikipedia have lots of information on every topic you can think of. Students can also take classes online and even get help with their homework through the internet.

Shopping and Business

Shopping has become easier too. You don’t need to go to a store to buy things anymore. Websites like Amazon let you order almost anything you want, and it will be delivered to your house. Businesses also use the internet to sell their products to people all over the world, which helps them make more money.

Entertainment is another area that has changed a lot. Before the internet, we had to go to the cinema to watch movies or buy CDs to listen to music. Now, we can watch movies and listen to music online using services like Netflix and Spotify. We can also play games with people from different countries without leaving our homes.

Problems and Solutions

Even though the internet has done a lot of good things, it also has some problems. Sometimes people can be mean to each other on the internet, or they might share things that are not true. To stay safe, it’s important to be nice to others online, think before you share something, and only talk to people you know.

The Internet Revolution is still happening. Every day, new things are being made to make the internet even better. We might not know exactly what the future holds, but it’s likely that the internet will keep making our lives easier in ways we can’t even imagine right now.

In conclusion, the Internet Revolution has changed the way we talk, learn, shop, and have fun. It has made the world a smaller place because we can connect with anyone, anywhere. As long as we use it wisely and safely, the internet will continue to be a powerful tool that can help us in many ways.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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Evolution of the Internet

The internet is a network of computers. The first network had only three computers. The complex history of the evolution of the internet involves many aspects such as technological, organizational, social, and political.

The inception of the internet was a result of military research done in the US during the Cold War era. In the 1960s, two antagonistic blocs (the United States and the Soviet Union) wielded enormous control and influence in the world. Hence, any mechanism, innovation, or new tool could help in countering the dispute between the Soviet Union and the United States (Krogfoss, Weldon, and Sofman 172).

The two superpowers also understood the effectiveness of the media.

Since the US government feared a Russian attack on its military bases, it designed a data exchange model that would allow decentralization of crucial information. Thus, if the Pentagon was hit, the information stored there would not be lost. It was, therefore, necessary to create a network linking different stations or bases. This network was referred as the ARPANET. It was developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

In 1962, JCR Licklider of MIT was already talking about the creation of an Intergalactic Network Computers (INC). ARPANET was the first stage in the rapid development of the internet. It came in 1969. It was a project of the Department of Defense (DoD) in the US. It was aimed at networking computers used in research centers for military purposes. After its introduction in 1972 and the establishment of the first international call a year later, the ARPANET network grew slowly in the 70s, but for security reasons, remained strictly controlled by the military network and inaccessible to large sectors of the international community and the US academic class (Haigh, Russell, and Dutton 148).

Computer Science Network came into existence in 1983, with the adoption of the protocols TCP / IP on the ARPANET which separated the component strictly from military use and formed MILNET. The creation of CSNET (Computer Science Network) and its connection to the ARPANET led to the full development of the true Internet (Shakkottai, Marina, Koga, Krioukov, and Claffy 274).

Over the years, the rate of growth of the internet has been speeding up. It has facilitated swift coordination and cooperation of structures between the increasing number of networks and the integrated operators. As early as 1983, the internet Activities Board was created. It later came to be known as the Internet Architecture Board. In 1989, the Internet Engineering Task Force was established alongside the Internet Research Task Force (Duguid 357). The agencies were at the forefront of speedy development of the internet and its usage. The creation of EUnet (European UNIX Network) took place in 1982 while in 1983; the European Academic and Research Network came into existence. An American academic network responsible for expanding ties of universities to the internet was ushered in 1986.

In 1984, another institution related to public administration in the US known as the National Science Foundation began the NSFNET network linking five supercomputers within five research centers and making the information available to any school that needed it. Supercomputers have a size similar to a mainframe computer although they have much higher processing speeds (King 57).

The NSFNET has become very popular. Instead of increasing the number of computers connected to the network supercomputers, other networks have been created and connected together (Almeida 67). All the interconnected networks are known as INTER-NET-WORK or simply the internet.

In 1991, the first commercial internet service was created after a lot of pressure from the academic and corporate world. This led to the appearance of PSI NET. In 1993, the World Wide Web (WWW) protocol was adopted. The protocol has increased the number of subscribers to the network.

Works Cited

Almeida, Virgilio. “The Evolution of Internet Governance: Lessons Learned from Netmundial.” IEEE Internet Computing 18.5 (2014): 65-69. Print.

Duguid, Paul. “Open Standards and the Internet Age: History, Ideology, and Networks.” Business History Review 2 (2015): 357. Print.

Haigh, Thomas, Andrew Russell, and William Dutton. “Histories of the Internet: Introducing a Special Issue of Information & Culture.” Information & Culture 50.2 (2015): 143-159. Print.

King, Alistair. “A Coordinated View of the Temporal Evolution of Large-Scale Internet Events.” Computing 96.1 (2014): 53-65. Print.

Krogfoss, Bill, Marcus Weldon, and Lev Sofman. “Internet Architecture Evolution and The Complex Economies of Content Peering.” Bell Labs Technical Journal 17.1 (2012): 163-184. Print.

Shakkottai, Srinivas, Marina Fomenkov, Ryan Koga, Dmitri Krioukov, and Kc Claffy. “Evolution of The Internet AS-Level Ecosystem.” European Physical Journal B — Condensed Matter 74.2 (2010): 271-278. Print.

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Essay on Importance of Internet: Samples for Students

Updated on
Nov 23, 2023

Internet is not just a need or luxury, it has become a household necessity. It was used as a source of entertainment but now it is impossible to work in offices or study without the Internet. When the global pandemic locked everyone in their house, it became an important medium to connect, study and work. Students were able to study without the risk of catching COVID-19 because of the Internet. The importance of the internet is also a common topic in various entrance exams such as SAT , TOEFL , and UPSC . In this blog, you will learn how to write an essay on the importance of the Internet.

This Blog Includes:

Tips to write the perfect essay on internet, sample 1 of essay on the importance of the internet (100 words), sample essay 2 – importance of the internet (150 words), sample essay 3 on use of internet for student (300 words).

Nikita Puri

Nikita is a creative writer and editor, who is always ready to learn new skills. She has great knowledge about study abroad universities, researching and writing blogs about them. Being a perfectionist, she has a habit of keeping her tasks complete on time before the OCD hits her. When Nikita is not busy working, you can find her eating while binge-watching The office. Also, she breathes music. She has done her bachelor's from Delhi University and her master's from Jamia Millia Islamia.

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Digital Revolution

The Digital Revolution (also known as the Third Industrial Revolution) is the shift from mechanical and analogue electronic technology to digital electronics, which began in the closing years of the 20th century.

The adoption of computers and other aspects of digital technology has transformed how humans interact with their environment, and these changes continue to the day.

This article will further give details about the Digital Revolution within the context of the Civil Services Examination.

Digital Revolution- Download PDF Here

History of Digital Revolution in Brief

The invention of the Analytical Engine (the precursor to the modern-day computer) by Charles Babbage in the late 19th century and as well as that of the telegraph is believed to have accelerated the Digital Revolution.
Digital communication began to be viable for economic reasons when the personal computer was invented.
The Digital Revolution was all about the conversion of analog technology to that of the digital format. This would make it possible for copies of the original to be made. For example, repeatable hardware was able to amplify the digital signal and pass it on with no loss of information in the signal
The turning point of the revolution was the change from analogue to digitally recorded music. During the 1980s, the digital format of optical compact discs gradually replaced analog formats, such as vinyl records and cassette tapes, as the popular medium of choice.

Social Impact of the Digital Revolution

The Digital Revolution has come with its fair share of negative and positive factors. They are detailed as follows:

Positive aspects:

Greater interconnectedness
Easier communication
Exposure of information that in the past could have more easily been suppressed by totalitarian regimes.

The revolutions during the Arab Spring of 2010-2012 were enabled by social networking and smartphone technology.

Regarding the economic impact of the digital revolution, there has been a wide- range of impacts. For example, without the advent of the internet, globalization would not be a feasible venture in today’s world

The revolution altered the way individuals and companies interact with each other. Small and medium enterprises today have access to large markets of the world

The adoption of digital technologies has resulted in a boost in economic productivity and its allied activities.

With the increase of technical advances, the digital revolution has created a demand for new job skills.

Negative effects

Information overload,
The rise in Internet predators
Forms of social isolation
Media saturation
Infringement in personal privacy

There have been some cases where excessive use of digital devices as well as computers for personal use has been linked to a company’s productivity, or at least such a perception seems to exist.

Personal computing and other non-work related digital activities in the workplace thus helped lead to stronger forms of privacy invasion, such as keystroke recording and information filtering applications (spyware and content-control software).

India and Digital Revolution

The Digital India programme, launched in July 2015, is a flagship programme of the Government of India with a vision of transforming India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.
India is one of the biggest and fastest-growing digital markets in the world.
Decisive government action and private-sector innovation are driving rapid, large-scale digital adoption.
With nearly 1.2 billion mobile subscriptions and 560 million internet subscriptions, India is home to the second-largest mobile subscription base in the world and the second-largest internet.
The Digital revolution has given considerable benefits to society at large, but it has also brought its fair share of concerns in the process.
Powers of communication and information sharing have been greatly expanded and with it new technologies that can exploit the information concerned have also cropped up.
It has ushered in a new scenario where mass surveillance can become the norm, bringing in its wake new concerns about civil and human rights.

Aspirants can find complete information about upcoming Government Exams through the linked article. More exam-related preparation materials will be found through the links given below

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Revolution of the Internet

perm # 6511612

The Internet, a very complex and revolutionary invention of 1965, has changed our world. The Internet can be defined as “a global communications network consisting of thousands of networks typically interconnected by fiber optic cabling ”( 1). The internet is always transforming into new complex hardware and software, in addition to the services it offers. Another definition of the internet is as follows: “The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location”(2). My objective for this paper is to demonstrate and explain what the Internet is, including its components and history.

The Internet can be explained as a network of networks, linking numerous government, university and private computers to one another, while providing many services such as E-mail, hypertext documents, instant messages, and data exchanges. The Internet is the largest network of networks worldwide. The Internet uses many different protocols, the most important being TCP/IP.

The computer networking revolution began in the early 1960s and has led us to today’s technology. The Internet was first invented for military purposes, and then expanded to the purpose of communication among scientists. The invention also came about in part by the increasing need for computers in the 1960s. During the Cold War, it was essential to have communications links between military and university computers that would not be disrupted by bombs or enemy spies. In order to solve the problem, in 1968 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) made contracts with BBN (Bolt, Beranek and Newman) to create ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).

The invention of the Internet, along with the field of computer networking, was derived from the invention of the telephone network. Unlike the telephone network, the Internet uses packet switching. Packet switching was invented by three different independent research groups around the world. MIT graduate student Leonard Kleinrock , one of the first people to invent packet switching, was also the first person to publish work on packet switching. The work done at MIT, Rand and NPL helped lay the foundation of today’s Internet. Kleinrock’s colleagues J.C.R. Licklider and Lawrence Roberts of MIT went on to head the computer science program at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Roberts published a complete plan for the ARPAnet , which is the first packet-switched computer network.

“Packet-switched and circuit-switched networks, two different technologies used for sending messages, each have their advantages for specific applications.”(9) The telephone network uses circuit switching, meaning that whenever a call is made, a circuit will be connected among two or more phone lines. Circuit switching networks require point to point bonding prior to transfer (there is only one path dedicated for the connection), and networks also require sending and receiving information constantly. On the other hand, the packet switching network, which has been used in the Internet, is different. Packet switching networks divide the data into small blocks; each block or packet has the possibility of taking a different path than the other to the destination; at the destination, the packets will be recompiled into the original message. (9)

In September of 1969, the first packet-switched computer network was installed in UCLA and was supervised by Kleinrock . In December of 1969, ARPA’s network expanded to include three other nodes throughout the United States : The Stanford Research Institute (SRI), The University of California Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah . Expansion became easy because of the decentralized structure of the network. The ARPA network was able to accommodate numerous kinds of machines. (4)

The ARPA network originally used NCP (Network Control Protocol), but as time progressed, the ARPA network adapted a new protocol called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol) in the year 1983 . The TCP “converts messages into streams of packets at the source, then reassembles them back into messages at the destination” (3). The IP “handles the addressing, seeing to it that packets are routed across multiple nodes and even across multiple networks with multiple standards” (3).

The internet started to become more popular and widespread. By the year 1971, 15 nodes (23 hosts) had been established in the following locations: the University of California Los Angeles , SRI, University of California Santa Barbara , University of Utah , BBN, MIT, RAND , SDC, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UIU(C), CWRU, CMU, NASA /Ames. Also, in the year 1971, E-mail was invented. E-mail is a program which sends messages from host to host throughout a network. E-mail is an essential way of communication today. Furthermore, by the end of the 197Os, there were 111 hosts nationwide .( 5)

Additional packet-switching networks were formed between 1970 and 1975. These networks include: ALOHAnet , Telenet , Cyclades ,Tymnet , GE Information Services network and IBM’s SNA network. “In Hawaii , Norman Abramson was developing ALOHAnet , a packet-based radio network that allowed multiple remote sites on the Hawaiian Islands to communicate with each other. The ALOHA protocol …was the first multiple-access protocol, allowing geographically distributed users to share a single broadcast communication medium (a radio frequency) ”( 4).

In early 1980s, there were more than two hundred hosts connected to ARPAnet . The number kept increasing and reached a hundred thousand by the end of the 1980s .( 5) Moreover, many computer networks were formed in the 1980s. In the year 1981 BITNET, the "Because It's Time NETwork " was established and became an e-mail provider. BITNET also became a provider of file transfers in order to link universities together in the Northeast. (4) In the same year, CSNET( Computer Science Network) was created for university scientists who did not have access to ARPAnet . CSNET also provided E-mail accounts for the university scientists .( 8) In 1986, NSFNET, which serves as a backbone for support, was established with the purpose of offering access to NSF-sponsored supercomputing centers. (4) The NSFNET started with a speed of 56 kbps and by the beginning of the 1990s their speed increased to 1.5 Mbps. (4)

The Internet quickly transformed from a nationwide infrastructure network to an international phenomenon. In the early 1980s, the French instigated the Minitel project, with the objective of bringing internet access to all French residents through more than 20,000 services. The Minitel system included a public packet-switched network, Minitel servers, and reasonably priced terminals that came with built-in low-speed modems. In 1994, the French government distributed free Minitel terminals to any French home that fancied one. The Minitel was in many French homes a decade before nearly any Americans knew about the Internet. (4)

(7)

In the 1990s, the whole world started to change more drastically technological wise and the Internet began to affect people. The number of end systems connected to the Internet reached one million. One of the most important events that happened in the 1990s was the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW). The first Web was started in November 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.(8) With the start of WWW and browsers to surf the Internet, the commercialization emerged and has change the world tremendously (especially, with the development of the GUI browsers, such as, Mosaic Communications by Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark, which were later called Netscape Communications Corporations, and their opponent Microsoft Explorer).(4) “The recent development and widespread deployment of the World Wide Web has brought with it a new community, as many of the people working on the WWW have not thought of themselves as primarily network researchers and developers.”(2) Today, people can do almost anything that they can think of over the Internet: shopping, taking University level courses and obtaining University degrees, sending Instant Messages (IM), using the phone network, listening to the Internet talk radio, banking, buying and selling stock on the stock market. Even citizens of Switzerland can vote in political elections online.

The change in the 90s was incredibly fast. In 1991, there were more than 1 trillion bytes per month and 10 billion packets per month traffics in NSFNET .( 8) In the same year, NSFNET increased their connection speed to T3 (44.736 Mbps).(8) In 1994, the traffic in NSFNET was more than 10 trillion bytes per month, and the number is increasing.(8) By the end of the 1990s, almost the whole world had access to the internet.

(10)

James F. Kurose and Keith W. Ross in their third edition of Computer Networking stated at the beginning of their book: “It seems that the computer networks are everywhere!”(4). Today computer networks (i.e. the Internet) literally are everywhere. In the year 2002, there were over 200 million end systems. Statistics predict that by the year 2010, about 80 percent of the world will be connected to the Internet. (5) As I have stated in the beginning of my paper: “the Internet is largest network of networks worldwide;” I think that it is important to comprehend what that really means. The Internet is our future and many of us have forgotten what it would be like if the Internet had never been invented. The Internet has brought nations and peoples closer together through the sharing of knowledge and information. Those of us whom are or have been influenced by the Internet have all become more interdependent with the rest of the world and essentially more knowledgeable than before.

Bibliography:

(1) Internet & Kleinschmidt , http://www.kleinschmidt.com/internet_and_kli/sld002.htm

(2) Barry M. Leiner , Vinton G. Cerf , David D. Clark , Robert E. Kahn , Leonard Kleinrock , Daniel C. Lynch , Jon Postel , Larry, G.Roberts , and Stephen Wolff , http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/%7Ecs176a/handouts/history.html

(3) Ted Nellen . HISTORY OF THE INTERNET, http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/history.html

(4) James F. Kurose and Keith W. Ross. Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring The Internet - 3 rd edition. 2005.

(5) William F. Slater. Internet History and Growth , 2002, h ttp://www.isoc.org/ internet / history / 2002_0918_Internet_History_and_Growth.ppt

(6) History of the Internet, http://www.internetvalley.com/archives/mirrors/davemarsh-timeline-1.htm

(7) An Atlas of Cyberspace, http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/geographic.html

(8) Robert H'obbes' Zakon , Hobbes’ Internet Timeline v7.0, http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

(9) Lee Copeland, Packet-Switched vs. Circuit-Switched Networks , http://www.computerworld.com/networkingtopics/networking/story/0,10801,41904,00.html

(10) Web Topology - Google and Friends, http://valiant.iat.sfu.ca/eculture/chanx/2003_11.html

By Alaa Gharbawi Cs 176A Perm # 6511612

The AI Revolution Is Crushing Thousands of Languages

English is the internet’s primary tongue—a fact that may have unexpected consequences as generative AI becomes central to daily life.

Recently, Bonaventure Dossou learned of an alarming tendency in a popular AI model. The program described Fon—a language spoken by Dossou’s mother and millions of others in Benin and neighboring countries—as “a fictional language.”

This result, which I replicated, is not unusual. Dossou is accustomed to the feeling that his culture is unseen by technology that so easily serves other people. He grew up with no Wikipedia pages in Fon, and no translation programs to help him communicate with his mother in French, in which he is more fluent. “When we have a technology that treats something as simple and fundamental as our name as an error, it robs us of our personhood,” Dossou told me.

The rise of the internet, alongside decades of American hegemony, made English into a common tongue for business, politics, science, and entertainment. More than half of all websites are in English, yet more than 80 percent of people in the world don’t speak the language. Even basic aspects of digital life—searching with Google, talking to Siri, relying on autocorrect, simply typing on a smartphone—have long been closed off to much of the world. And now the generative-AI boom, despite promises to bridge languages and cultures, may only further entrench the dominance of English in life on and off the web.

Scale is central to this technology. Compared with previous generations, today’s AI requires orders of magnitude more computing power and training data, all to create the humanlike language that has bedazzled so many users of ChatGPT and other programs. Much of the information that generative AI “learns” from is simply scraped from the open web. For that reason, the preponderance of English-language text online could mean that generative AI works best in English, cementing a cultural bias in a technology that has been marketed for its potential to “ benefit humanity as a whole .” Some other languages are also well positioned for the generative-AI age, but only a handful: Nearly 90 percent of websites are written in just 10 languages (English, Russian, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Turkish, Portuguese, Italian, and Persian).

Some 7,000 languages are spoken in the world. Google Translate supports 133 of them. Chatbots from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are still more constrained. “There’s a sharp cliff in performance,” Sara Hooker, a computer scientist and the head of Cohere for AI, a nonprofit research arm of the tech company Cohere, told me. “Most of the highest-performance [language] models serve eight to 10 languages. After that, there’s almost a vacuum.” As chatbots, translation devices, and voice assistants become a crucial way to navigate the web , that rising tide of generative AI could wash out thousands of Indigenous and low-resource languages such as Fon—languages that lack sufficient text with which to train AI models.

“Many people ignore those languages, both from a linguistic standpoint and from a computational standpoint,” Ife Adebara, an AI researcher and a computational linguist at the University of British Columbia, told me. Younger generations will have less and less incentive to learn their forebears’ tongues. And this is not just a matter of replicating existing issues with the web: If generative AI indeed becomes the portal through which the internet is accessed, then billions of people may in fact be worse off than they are today.

Adebara and Dossou, who is now a computer scientist at Canada’s McGill University, work with Masakhane , a collective of researchers building AI tools for African languages. Masakhane, in turn, is part of a growing, global effort racing against the clock to create software for, and hopefully save, languages that are poorly represented on the web. In recent decades, “there has been enormous progress in modeling low-resource languages,” Alexandra Birch, a machine-translation researcher at the University of Edinburgh, told me.

In a promising development that speaks to generative AI’s capacity to surprise, computer scientists have discovered that some AI programs can pinpoint aspects of communication that transcend a specific language. Perhaps the technology could be used to make the web more aware of less common tongues. A program trained on languages for which a decent amount of data are available—English, French, or Russian, say—will then perform better in a lower-resourced language, such as Fon or Punjabi. “Every language is going to have something like a subject or a verb,” Antonios Anastasopoulos, a computer scientist at George Mason University, told me. “So even if these manifest themselves in very different ways, you can learn something from all of the other languages.” Birch likened this to how a child who grows up speaking English and German can move seamlessly between the two, even if they haven’t studied direct translations between the languages—not moving from word to word, but grasping something more fundamental about communication.

Read: The end of foreign-language education

But this discovery alone may not be enough to turn the tide. Building AI models for low-resource languages is painstaking and time-intensive. Cohere recently released a large language model that has state-of-the-art performance for 101 languages, of which more than half are low-resource. That leaves about 6,900 languages to go, and this effort alone required 3,000 people working across 119 countries. To create training data, researchers frequently work with native speakers who answer questions, transcribe recordings, or annotate existing text, which can be slow and expensive. Adebara spent years curating a 42-gigabyte training data set for 517 African languages, the largest and most comprehensive to date. Her data set is 0.4 percent of the size of the largest publicly available English training data set. OpenAI’s proprietary databases—the ones used to train products such as ChatGPT—are likely far larger.

Much of the limited text readily available in low-resource languages is of poor quality—itself badly translated—or limited use. For years, the main sources of text for many such low-resource languages in Africa were translations of the Bible or missionary websites, such as those from Jehovah’s Witnesses. And crucial examples for fine-tuning AI, which has to be intentionally created and curated—data used to make a chatbot helpful, human-sounding, not racist , and so on—are even rarer. Funding, computing resources, and language-specific expertise are frequently just as hard to come by. Language models can struggle to comprehend non-Latin scripts or, because of limited training examples, to properly separate words in low-resource-language sentences—not to mention those without a writing system.

The trouble is that, while developing tools for these languages is slow going, generative AI is rapidly overtaking the web . Synthetic content is flooding search engines and social media like a kind of gray goo , all in hopes of making a quick buck.

Most websites make money through advertisements and subscriptions, which rely on attracting clicks and attention. Already, an enormous portion of the web consists of content with limited literary or informational merit—an endless ocean of junk that exists only because it might be clicked on . What better way to expand one’s audience than to translate content into another language with whatever AI program comes up on a Google search?

Read: Prepare for the textpocalypse

Those translation programs, already of sometimes questionable accuracy, are especially bad with low-resourced languages. Sure enough, researchers published preliminary findings earlier this year that online content in such languages was more likely to have been (poorly) translated from another source, and that the original material was itself more likely to be geared toward maximizing clicks, compared with websites in English or other higher-resource languages. Training on large amounts of this flawed material will make products such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude even worse for low-resource languages, akin to asking someone to prepare a fresh salad with nothing more than a pound of ground beef. “You are already training the model on incorrect data, and the model itself tends to produce even more incorrect data,” Mehak Dhaliwal, a computer scientist at UC Santa Barbara and one of the study’s authors, told me—potentially exposing speakers of low-resource languages to misinformation. And those outputs, spewed across the web and likely used to train future language models, could create a feedback loop of degrading performance for thousands of languages.

Imagine “you want to do a task, and you want a machine to do it for you,” David Adelani, a DeepMind research fellow at University College London, told me. “If you express this in your own language and the technology doesn’t understand, you will not be able to do this. A lot of things that simplify lives for people in economically rich countries, you will not be able to do.” All of the web’s existing linguistic barriers will rise: You won’t be able to use AI to tutor your child, draft work memos, summarize books, conduct research, manage a calendar, book a vacation, fill out tax forms, surf the web, and so on. Even when AI models are able to process low-resource languages, the programs require more memory and computational power to do so, and thus become significantly more expensive to run—meaning worse results at higher costs .

AI models might also be void of cultural nuance and context, no matter how grammatically adept they become. Such programs long translated “good morning” to a variation of “someone has died” in Yoruba, Adelani said, because the same Yoruba phrase can convey either meaning. Text translated from English has been used to generate training data for Indonesian, Vietnamese, and other languages spoken by hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia. As Holy Lovenia, a researcher at AI Singapore, the country’s program for AI research, told me, the resulting models know much more about hamburgers and Big Ben than local cuisines and landmarks.

It may already be too late to save some languages. As AI and the internet make English and other higher-resource languages more and more convenient for young people, Indigenous and less widely spoken tongues could vanish. If you are reading this, there is a good chance that much of your life is already lived online; that will become true for more people around the world as time goes on and technology spreads. For the machine to function, the user must speak its language.

By default, less common languages may simply seem irrelevant to AI, the web, and, in turn, everyday people—eventually leading to abandonment. “If nothing is done about this, it could take a couple of years before many languages go into extinction,” Adebara said. She is already witnessing languages she studied as an undergraduate dwindle in their usage. “When people see that their languages have no orthography, no books, no technology, it gives them the impression that their languages are not valuable.”

Read: AI is exposing who really has power in Silicon Valley

Her own work, including a language model that can read and write in hundreds of African languages, aims to change that. When she shows speakers of African languages her software, they tell her, “‘I saw my language in the technology you built; I wasn’t expecting to see it there,’” Adebara said. “‘I didn’t know that some technology would be able to understand some part of my language,’ and they feel really excited. That makes me also feel excited.”

Several experts told me that the path forward for AI and low-resource languages lies not only in technical innovation, but in just these sorts of conversations: not indiscriminately telling the world it needs ChatGPT, but asking native speakers what the technology can do for them. They might benefit from better voice recognition in a local dialect, or a program that can read and digitize non-Roman script, rather than the all-powerful chatbots being sold by tech titans. Rather than relying on Meta or OpenAI, Dossou told me, he hopes to build “a platform that is appropriate and proper to African languages and Africans, not trying to generalize as Big Tech does.” Such efforts could help give low-resource languages a presence on the internet where there was almost none before, for future generations to use and learn from.

Today, there is a Fon Wikipedia, although its 1,300 or so articles are about two-thousandths of the total on its English counterpart. Dossou has worked on AI software that does recognize names in African languages. He translated hundreds of proverbs between French and Fon manually, then created a survey for people to tell him common Fon sentences and phrases. The resulting French-Fon translator he built has helped him better communicate with his mother—and his mother’s feedback on those translations has helped improve the AI program. “I would have needed a machine-translation tool to be able to communicate with her,” he said. Now he is beginning to understand her without machine assistance. A person and their community, rather than the internet or a piece of software, should decide their native language—and Dossou is realizing that his is Fon, rather than French.

Education: a New Learning Curve

Louis leakey and human evolution emerging out of africa, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, technosols: customised soils to revive the earth and perhaps conquer other worlds, featured author, latest book, the impact of the internet on society: a global perspective, introduction.

The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the vector of technological transformation of the Industrial Age. This global network of computer networks, largely based nowadays on platforms of wireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time, transcending space. The Internet is not really a new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969 (Abbate 1999). But it was in the 1990s when it was privatized and released from the control of the U.S. Department of Commerce that it diffused around the world at extraordinary speed: in 1996 the first survey of Internet users counted about 40 million; in 2013 they are over 2.5 billion, with China accounting for the largest number of Internet users. Furthermore, for some time the spread of the Internet was limited by the difficulty to lay out land-based telecommunications infrastructure in the emerging countries. This has changed with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, in 1991, there were about 16 million subscribers of wireless devices in the world, in 2013 they are close to 7 billion (in a planet of 7.7 billion human beings). Counting on the family and village uses of mobile phones, and taking into consideration the limited use of these devices among children under five years of age, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in the bandwidth as well as in the efficiency and price of the service.

At the heart of these communication networks the Internet ensures the production, distribution, and use of digitized information in all formats. According to the study published by Martin Hilbert in Science (Hilbert and López 2011), 95 percent of all information existing in the planet is digitized and most of it is accessible on the Internet and other computer networks.

The speed and scope of the transformation of our communication environment by Internet and wireless communication has triggered all kind of utopian and dystopian perceptions around the world.

As in all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.

The media aggravate the distorted perception by dwelling into scary reports on the basis of anecdotal observation and biased commentary. If there is a topic in which social sciences, in their diversity, should contribute to the full understanding of the world in which we live, it is precisely the area that has come to be named in academia as Internet Studies. Because, in fact, academic research knows a great deal on the interaction between Internet and society, on the basis of methodologically rigorous empirical research conducted in a plurality of cultural and institutional contexts. Any process of major technological change generates its own mythology. In part because it comes into practice before scientists can assess its effects and implications, so there is always a gap between social change and its understanding. For instance, media often report that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of alienation, isolation, depression, and withdrawal from society. In fact, available evidence shows that there is either no relationship or a positive cumulative relationship between the Internet use and the intensity of sociability. We observe that, overall, the more sociable people are, the more they use the Internet. And the more they use the Internet, the more they increase their sociability online and offline, their civic engagement, and the intensity of family and friendship relationships, in all cultures—with the exception of a couple of early studies of the Internet in the 1990s, corrected by their authors later (Castells 2001; Castells et al. 2007; Rainie and Wellman 2012; Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.).

Thus, the purpose of this chapter will be to summarize some of the key research findings on the social effects of the Internet relying on the evidence provided by some of the major institutions specialized in the social study of the Internet. More specifically, I will be using the data from the world at large: the World Internet Survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future, University of Southern California; the reports of the British Computer Society (BCS), using data from the World Values Survey of the University of Michigan; the Nielsen reports for a variety of countries; and the annual reports from the International Telecommunications Union. For data on the United States, I have used the Pew American Life and Internet Project of the Pew Institute. For the United Kingdom, the Oxford Internet Survey from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, as well as the Virtual Society Project from the Economic and Social Science Research Council. For Spain, the Project Internet Catalonia of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC); the various reports on the information society from Telefónica; and from the Orange Foundation. For Portugal, the Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC) in Lisbon. I would like to emphasize that most of the data in these reports converge toward similar trends. Thus I have selected for my analysis the findings that complement and reinforce each other, offering a consistent picture of the human experience on the Internet in spite of the human diversity.

Given the aim of this publication to reach a broad audience, I will not present in this text the data supporting the analysis presented here. Instead, I am referring the interested reader to the web sources of the research organizations mentioned above, as well as to selected bibliographic references discussing the empirical foundation of the social trends reported here.

Technologies of Freedom, the Network Society, and the Culture of Autonomy

In order to fully understand the effects of the Internet on society, we should remember that technology is material culture. It is produced in a social process in a given institutional environment on the basis of the ideas, values, interests, and knowledge of their producers, both their early producers and their subsequent producers. In this process we must include the users of the technology, who appropriate and adapt the technology rather than adopting it, and by so doing they modify it and produce it in an endless process of interaction between technological production and social use. So, to assess the relevance of Internet in society we must recall the specific characteristics of Internet as a technology. Then we must place it in the context of the transformation of the overall social structure, as well as in relationship to the culture characteristic of this social structure. Indeed, we live in a new social structure, the global network society, characterized by the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy.

Internet is a technology of freedom, in the terms coined by Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1973, coming from a libertarian culture, paradoxically financed by the Pentagon for the benefit of scientists, engineers, and their students, with no direct military application in mind (Castells 2001). The expansion of the Internet from the mid-1990s onward resulted from the combination of three main factors:

The technological discovery of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and his willingness to distribute the source code to improve it by the open-source contribution of a global community of users, in continuity with the openness of the TCP/IP Internet protocols. The web keeps running under the same principle of open source. And two-thirds of web servers are operated by Apache, an open-source server program.
Institutional change in the management of the Internet, keeping it under the loose management of the global Internet community, privatizing it, and allowing both commercial uses and cooperative uses.
Major changes in social structure, culture, and social behavior: networking as a prevalent organizational form; individuation as the main orientation of social behavior; and the culture of autonomy as the culture of the network society.

I will elaborate on these major trends.

Our society is a network society; that is, a society constructed around personal and organizational networks powered by digital networks and communicated by the Internet. And because networks are global and know no boundaries, the network society is a global network society. This historically specific social structure resulted from the interaction between the emerging technological paradigm based on the digital revolution and some major sociocultural changes. A primary dimension of these changes is what has been labeled the rise of the Me-centered society, or, in sociological terms, the process of individuation, the decline of community understood in terms of space, work, family, and ascription in general. This is not the end of community, and not the end of place-based interaction, but there is a shift toward the reconstruction of social relationships, including strong cultural and personal ties that could be considered a form of community, on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects.

The process of individuation is not just a matter of cultural evolution, it is materially produced by the new forms of organizing economic activities, and social and political life, as I analyzed in my trilogy on the Information Age (Castells 1996–2003). It is based on the transformation of space (metropolitan life), work and economic activity (rise of the networked enterprise and networked work processes), culture and communication (shift from mass communication based on mass media to mass self-communication based on the Internet); on the crisis of the patriarchal family, with increasing autonomy of its individual members; the substitution of media politics for mass party politics; and globalization as the selective networking of places and processes throughout the planet.

But individuation does not mean isolation, or even less the end of community. Sociability is reconstructed as networked individualism and community through a quest for like-minded individuals in a process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace and the local space. Individuation is the key process in constituting subjects (individual or collective), networking is the organizational form constructed by these subjects; this is the network society, and the form of sociability is what Rainie and Wellman (2012) conceptualized as networked individualism. Network technologies are of course the medium for this new social structure and this new culture (Papacharissi 2010).

As stated above, academic research has established that the Internet does not isolate people, nor does it reduce their sociability; it actually increases sociability, as shown by myself in my studies in Catalonia (Castells 2007), Rainie and Wellman in the United States (2012), Cardoso in Portugal (2010), and the World Internet Survey for the world at large (Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.). Furthermore, a major study by Michael Willmott for the British Computer Society (Trajectory Partnership 2010) has shown a positive correlation, for individuals and for countries, between the frequency and intensity of the use of the Internet and the psychological indicators of personal happiness. He used global data for 35,000 people obtained from the World Wide Survey of the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2007. Controlling for other factors, the study showed that Internet use empowers people by increasing their feelings of security, personal freedom, and influence, all feelings that have a positive effect on happiness and personal well-being. The effect is particularly positive for people with lower income and who are less qualified, for people in the developing world, and for women. Age does not affect the positive relationship; it is significant for all ages. Why women? Because they are at the center of the network of their families, Internet helps them to organize their lives. Also, it helps them to overcome their isolation, particularly in patriarchal societies. The Internet also contributes to the rise of the culture of autonomy.

The key for the process of individuation is the construction of autonomy by social actors, who become subjects in the process. They do so by defining their specific projects in interaction with, but not submission to, the institutions of society. This is the case for a minority of individuals, but because of their capacity to lead and mobilize they introduce a new culture in every domain of social life: in work (entrepreneurship), in the media (the active audience), in the Internet (the creative user), in the market (the informed and proactive consumer), in education (students as informed critical thinkers, making possible the new frontier of e-learning and m-learning pedagogy), in health (the patient-centered health management system) in e-government (the informed, participatory citizen), in social movements (cultural change from the grassroots, as in feminism or environmentalism), and in politics (the independent-minded citizen able to participate in self-generated political networks).

There is increasing evidence of the direct relationship between the Internet and the rise of social autonomy. From 2002 to 2007 I directed in Catalonia one of the largest studies ever conducted in Europe on the Internet and society, based on 55,000 interviews, one-third of them face to face (IN3 2002–07). As part of this study, my collaborators and I compared the behavior of Internet users to non-Internet users in a sample of 3,000 people, representative of the population of Catalonia. Because in 2003 only about 40 percent of people were Internet users we could really compare the differences in social behavior for users and non-users, something that nowadays would be more difficult given the 79 percent penetration rate of the Internet in Catalonia. Although the data are relatively old, the findings are not, as more recent studies in other countries (particularly in Portugal) appear to confirm the observed trends. We constructed scales of autonomy in different dimensions. Only between 10 and 20 percent of the population, depending on dimensions, were in the high level of autonomy. But we focused on this active segment of the population to explore the role of the Internet in the construction of autonomy. Using factor analysis we identified six major types of autonomy based on projects of individuals according to their practices:

a) professional development b) communicative autonomy c) entrepreneurship d) autonomy of the body e) sociopolitical participation f) personal, individual autonomy

These six types of autonomous practices were statistically independent among themselves. But each one of them correlated positively with Internet use in statistically significant terms, in a self-reinforcing loop (time sequence): the more one person was autonomous, the more she/he used the web, and the more she/he used the web, the more autonomous she/he became (Castells et al. 2007). This is a major empirical finding. Because if the dominant cultural trend in our society is the search for autonomy, and if the Internet powers this search, then we are moving toward a society of assertive individuals and cultural freedom, regardless of the barriers of rigid social organizations inherited from the Industrial Age. From this Internet-based culture of autonomy have emerged a new kind of sociability, networked sociability, and a new kind of sociopolitical practice, networked social movements and networked democracy. I will now turn to the analysis of these two fundamental trends at the source of current processes of social change worldwide.

The Rise of Social Network Sites on the Internet

Since 2002 (creation of Friendster, prior to Facebook) a new socio-technical revolution has taken place on the Internet: the rise of social network sites where now all human activities are present, from personal interaction to business, to work, to culture, to communication, to social movements, and to politics.

Social Network Sites are web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

(Boyd and Ellison 2007, 2)

Social networking uses, in time globally spent, surpassed e-mail in November 2007. It surpassed e-mail in number of users in July 2009. In terms of users it reached 1 billion by September 2010, with Facebook accounting for about half of it. In 2013 it has almost doubled, particularly because of increasing use in China, India, and Latin America. There is indeed a great diversity of social networking sites (SNS) by countries and cultures. Facebook, started for Harvard-only members in 2004, is present in most of the world, but QQ, Cyworld, and Baidu dominate in China; Orkut in Brazil; Mixi in Japan; etc. In terms of demographics, age is the main differential factor in the use of SNS, with a drop of frequency of use after 50 years of age, and particularly 65. But this is not just a teenager’s activity. The main Facebook U.S. category is in the age group 35–44, whose frequency of use of the site is higher than for younger people. Nearly 60 percent of adults in the U.S. have at least one SNS profile, 30 percent two, and 15 percent three or more. Females are as present as males, except when in a society there is a general gender gap. We observe no differences in education and class, but there is some class specialization of SNS, such as Myspace being lower than FB; LinkedIn is for professionals.

Thus, the most important activity on the Internet at this point in time goes through social networking, and SNS have become the chosen platforms for all kind of activities, not just personal friendships or chatting, but for marketing, e-commerce, education, cultural creativity, media and entertainment distribution, health applications, and sociopolitical activism. This is a significant trend for society at large. Let me explore the meaning of this trend on the basis of the still scant evidence.

Social networking sites are constructed by users themselves building on specific criteria of grouping. There is entrepreneurship in the process of creating sites, then people choose according to their interests and projects. Networks are tailored by people themselves with different levels of profiling and privacy. The key to success is not anonymity, but on the contrary, self-presentation of a real person connecting to real people (in some cases people are excluded from the SNS when they fake their identity). So, it is a self-constructed society by networking connecting to other networks. But this is not a virtual society. There is a close connection between virtual networks and networks in life at large. This is a hybrid world, a real world, not a virtual world or a segregated world.

People build networks to be with others, and to be with others they want to be with on the basis of criteria that include those people who they already know (a selected sub-segment). Most users go on the site every day. It is permanent connectivity. If we needed an answer to what happened to sociability in the Internet world, here it is:

There is a dramatic increase in sociability, but a different kind of sociability, facilitated and dynamized by permanent connectivity and social networking on the web.

Based on the time when Facebook was still releasing data (this time is now gone) we know that in 2009 users spent 500 billion minutes per month. This is not just about friendship or interpersonal communication. People do things together, share, act, exactly as in society, although the personal dimension is always there. Thus, in the U.S. 38 percent of adults share content, 21 percent remix, 14 percent blog, and this is growing exponentially, with development of technology, software, and SNS entrepreneurial initiatives. On Facebook, in 2009 the average user was connected to 60 pages, groups, and events, people interacted per month to 160 million objects (pages, groups, events), the average user created 70 pieces of content per month, and there were 25 billion pieces of content shared per month (web links, news stories, blogs posts, notes, photos). SNS are living spaces connecting all dimensions of people’s experience. This transforms culture because people share experience with a low emotional cost, while saving energy and effort. They transcend time and space, yet they produce content, set up links, and connect practices. It is a constantly networked world in every dimension of human experience. They co-evolve in permanent, multiple interaction. But they choose the terms of their co-evolution.

Thus, people live their physical lives but increasingly connect on multiple dimensions in SNS.

Paradoxically, the virtual life is more social than the physical life, now individualized by the organization of work and urban living.

But people do not live a virtual reality, indeed it is a real virtuality, since social practices, sharing, mixing, and living in society is facilitated in the virtuality, in what I called time ago the “space of flows” (Castells 1996).

Because people are increasingly at ease in the multi-textuality and multidimensionality of the web, marketers, work organizations, service agencies, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the Internet, less and less setting up alternative sites, more and more being present in the networks that people construct by themselves and for themselves, with the help of Internet social networking entrepreneurs, some of whom become billionaires in the process, actually selling freedom and the possibility of the autonomous construction of lives. This is the liberating potential of the Internet made material practice by these social networking sites. The largest of these social networking sites are usually bounded social spaces managed by a company. However, if the company tries to impede free communication it may lose many of its users, because the entry barriers in this industry are very low. A couple of technologically savvy youngsters with little capital can set up a site on the Internet and attract escapees from a more restricted Internet space, as happened to AOL and other networking sites of the first generation, and as could happen to Facebook or any other SNS if they are tempted to tinker with the rules of openness (Facebook tried to make users pay and retracted within days). So, SNS are often a business, but they are in the business of selling freedom, free expression, chosen sociability. When they tinker with this promise they risk their hollowing by net citizens migrating with their friends to more friendly virtual lands.

Perhaps the most telling expression of this new freedom is the transformation of sociopolitical practices on the Internet.

Communication Power: Mass-Self Communication and the Transformation of Politics

Power and counterpower, the foundational relationships of society, are constructed in the human mind, through the construction of meaning and the processing of information according to certain sets of values and interests (Castells 2009).

Ideological apparatuses and the mass media have been key tools of mediating communication and asserting power, and still are. But the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy, has found in Internet and mobile communication networks a major medium of mass self-communication and self-organization.

The key source for the social production of meaning is the process of socialized communication. I define communication as the process of sharing meaning through the exchange of information. Socialized communication is the one that exists in the public realm, that has the potential of reaching society at large. Therefore, the battle over the human mind is largely played out in the process of socialized communication. And this is particularly so in the network society, the social structure of the Information Age, which is characterized by the pervasiveness of communication networks in a multimodal hypertext.

The ongoing transformation of communication technology in the digital age extends the reach of communication media to all domains of social life in a network that is at the same time global and local, generic and customized, in an ever-changing pattern.

As a result, power relations, that is the relations that constitute the foundation of all societies, as well as the processes challenging institutionalized power relations, are increasingly shaped and decided in the communication field. Meaningful, conscious communication is what makes humans human. Thus, any major transformation in the technology and organization of communication is of utmost relevance for social change. Over the last four decades the advent of the Internet and of wireless communication has shifted the communication process in society at large from mass communication to mass self-communication. This is from a message sent from one to many with little interactivity to a system based on messages from many to many, multimodal, in chosen time, and with interactivity, so that senders are receivers and receivers are senders. And both have access to a multimodal hypertext in the web that constitutes the endlessly changing backbone of communication processes.

The transformation of communication from mass communication to mass self-communication has contributed decisively to alter the process of social change. As power relationships have always been based on the control of communication and information that feed the neural networks constitutive of the human mind, the rise of horizontal networks of communication has created a new landscape of social and political change by the process of disintermediation of the government and corporate controls over communication. This is the power of the network, as social actors build their own networks on the basis of their projects, values, and interests. The outcome of these processes is open ended and dependent on specific contexts. Freedom, in this case freedom of communicate, does not say anything on the uses of freedom in society. This is to be established by scholarly research. But we need to start from this major historical phenomenon: the building of a global communication network based on the Internet, a technology that embodies the culture of freedom that was at its source.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century there have been multiple social movements around the world that have used the Internet as their space of formation and permanent connectivity, among the movements and with society at large. These networked social movements, formed in the social networking sites on the Internet, have mobilized in the urban space and in the institutional space, inducing new forms of social movements that are the main actors of social change in the network society. Networked social movements have been particularly active since 2010, and especially in the Arab revolutions against dictatorships; in Europe and the U.S. as forms of protest against the management of the financial crisis; in Brazil; in Turkey; in Mexico; and in highly diverse institutional contexts and economic conditions. It is precisely the similarity of the movements in extremely different contexts that allows the formulation of the hypothesis that this is the pattern of social movements characteristic of the global network society. In all cases we observe the capacity of these movements for self-organization, without a central leadership, on the basis of a spontaneous emotional movement. In all cases there is a connection between Internet-based communication, mobile networks, and the mass media in different forms, feeding into each other and amplifying the movement locally and globally.

These movements take place in the context of exploitation and oppression, social tensions and social struggles; but struggles that were not able to successfully challenge the state in other instances of revolt are now powered by the tools of mass self-communication. It is not the technology that induces the movements, but without the technology (Internet and wireless communication) social movements would not take the present form of being a challenge to state power. The fact is that technology is material culture (ideas brought into the design) and the Internet materialized the culture of freedom that, as it has been documented, emerged on American campuses in the 1960s. This culture-made technology is at the source of the new wave of social movements that exemplify the depth of the global impact of the Internet in all spheres of social organization, affecting particularly power relationships, the foundation of the institutions of society. (See case studies and an analytical perspective on the interaction between Internet and networked social movements in Castells 2012.)

The Internet, as all technologies, does not produce effects by itself. Yet, it has specific effects in altering the capacity of the communication system to be organized around flows that are interactive, multimodal, asynchronous or synchronous, global or local, and from many to many, from people to people, from people to objects, and from objects to objects, increasingly relying on the semantic web. How these characteristics affect specific systems of social relationships has to be established by research, and this is what I tried to present in this text. What is clear is that without the Internet we would not have seen the large-scale development of networking as the fundamental mechanism of social structuring and social change in every domain of social life. The Internet, the World Wide Web, and a variety of networks increasingly based on wireless platforms constitute the technological infrastructure of the network society, as the electrical grid and the electrical engine were the support system for the form of social organization that we conceptualized as the industrial society. Thus, as a social construction, this technological system is open ended, as the network society is an open-ended form of social organization that conveys the best and the worse in humankind. Yet, the global network society is our society, and the understanding of its logic on the basis of the interaction between culture, organization, and technology in the formation and development of social and technological networks is a key field of research in the twenty-first century.

We can only make progress in our understanding through the cumulative effort of scholarly research. Only then we will be able to cut through the myths surrounding the key technology of our time. A digital communication technology that is already a second skin for young people, yet it continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand.

These references are in fact sources of more detailed references specific to each one of the topics analyzed in this text.

Abbate, Janet. A Social History of the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007).

Cardoso, Gustavo, Angus Cheong, and Jeffrey Cole (eds). World Wide Internet: Changing Societies, Economies and Cultures. Macau: University of Macau Press, 2009.

Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–2003.

———. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

———. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

———. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

Castells, Manuel, Imma Tubella, Teresa Sancho, and Meritxell Roca.

La transición a la sociedad red. Barcelona: Ariel, 2007.

Hilbert, Martin, and Priscilla López. “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information.” Science 332, no. 6025 (April 1, 2011): pp. 60–65.

Papacharissi, Zizi, ed. The Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Networking Sites. Routledge, 2010.

Rainie. Lee, and Barry Wellman. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Trajectory Partnership (Michael Willmott and Paul Flatters). The Information Dividend: Why IT Makes You “Happier.” Swindon: British Informatics Society Limited, 2010. http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/info-dividend-full-report.pdf

Selected Web References. Used as sources for analysis in the chapter

Agência para a Sociedade do Conhecimento. “Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC).” http://www.umic.pt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3026&Itemid=167

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. “Features, Press and Policy.” http://www.bcs.org/category/7307

Center for the Digital Future. The World Internet Project International Report. 4th ed. Los Angeles: USC Annenberg School, Center for the Digital Future, 2012. http://www.worldinternetproject.net/_files/_Published/_oldis/770_2012wip_report4th_ed.pdf

ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council). “Papers and Reports.” Virtual Society. http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk/reports.htm

Fundación Orange. “Análisis y Prospectiva: Informe eEspaña.” Fundación Orange. http://fundacionorange.es/fundacionorange/analisisprospectiva.html

Fundación Telefónica. “Informes SI.” Fundación Telefónica. http://sociedadinformacion.fundacion.telefonica.com/DYC/SHI/InformesSI/seccion=1190&idioma=es_ES.do

IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute). UOC. “Project Internet Catalonia (PIC): An Overview.” Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, 2002–07. http://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic/eng/

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The Impact of the Industrial Revolution in America

This essay about the profound impact of the Industrial Revolution on American history, economy, and society. It discusses the technological advancements, economic transformation, social inequalities, environmental consequences, and cultural shifts brought about by this monumental era of change. From the rise of industrial capitalism to the emergence of consumer culture and environmental awareness, the essay explores how the echoes of the Industrial Revolution continue to shape the trajectory of the nation in the 21st century.

How it works

Industrial shock stands so as monumental head in American history, his influence, gives up profond shadow above landscape, economy, and public fabric national. Executes he between a test 18th-century Britain strict, it epoch an appeal cut Atlantique, to find fat land in America, unleashing from inflow wave change, that co-ordinated an aspect nation new in roads both profond, so and, enduring. In a heart this seismic moving lay relentless fanfare the technological moving forward, birthing wave innovation in making and transfer.

In soil creative ability, inventions so as for example cotton gin, engine fertile American, and telegraph set fire revolution in effectiveness, hammers in nation advance-guard industrialization. These technological wonders heralded a new era marked an increase one stretch factories and noisy municipal centers. Places of crossing industrialization économiques were nothing brevity revolutionary, moves America from an agrarian economy despite a fountain industrial activity. Supplied fuel the landed methods and one dismisses he labour force abundant contraignent, nation became a test strict industrial activity, with factories, twist up he shop-windows in unprecedented cadence. Cities unstrung he, because rural transmigrate flowed in municipal centers in searches possibilities employment, co-ordinates beginning cities, pulsating with the disturbed energy and ambition. Unit, side sideways his promise moving forward, shock, it have a rest bare realities public inequality hard industrialist. Because industrialists collected riches and authority, a precipice increases between admittance and impoverished, with much laborers, enduring terms severe for thin payments. Divide this absolute supplied fuel wave anxiety and business public activity, because asked a worker tirelessly for treatment and working terms cleared. Between shock, industrial shock ushered wave innovation, that co-ordinated an aspect American landscape new technological. From groundbreaking techniques connection measures a measure chain Ford henry despite electrification cities, the American inventors pushed borders possibility, moves nation in an era prosperity and new moving forward. Large results in a transfer, so as for example steam moves and transcontinental iron road, revolutionized trade and trade, shortens the distance raised between remote societies and supplies a fuel economic increase. However, rhythm industrialization rapid exacted collection on an environment, because infection and extraction resource unexperienced took a large expense on national ecosystems. Rivers and the rivers became muddy with industrial garbages, while air in municipal centers height thick with smoke and smog. Decline, tilled industrial increase, ecological threw open pressing questions from a display the economic American model fastens, prompting despite appeals storage and ecological adjusting. In a kingdom culture and society, industrial shock co-ordinated beginning era consumption and folk culture massive news. Advancement in advertising and marketing supplied fuel culture defence rights consumers, because Americans moved newfound abundance shop-windows and benefactions. From supermarkets despite parks entertainment, a novice brings up he from spare time and entertainment poured out he, serves despite an increase asks all and abundance middle employments. Because America inflicts a map their cape through complications 21 – ?? century, inheritance industrial shock continues to draw he large, brings up national equality and trajectory in deep roads. From an increase industrial capitalism despite appearance consumer culture and ecological undertakes, echoes it yields processing remain an era ever-present, serves mention authority creative powerful human ability, to bring up a cape history.

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