"What is the Internet and What Will It Become?"

We talked yesterday about the impact of the internet and expansions in technology on business and the economy, and more specifically on the media. The internet has made it easier for businesses to operate, but also for new businesses to emerge without having to jump over the traditional hurdles that used to prevent potential businesses from cropping up. Whereas businesses used to need to be able to produce their products, distribute them and market them all on their own, the internet now makes it possible to contract production and distribution and to advertise for free on platforms like youtube.

The barriers for new potential news sources are even lower; what used to require a printing press, a subscriber base, and a distribution network as well as an office and an army of reporters can now be done by anybody with a computer who has interesting things to say. This blog post, for example, could potentially attract just as many viewers as an article on a major publication. (It won’t because people aren’t quite as interested in what I have to say. But it could…) Moreover, newspapers and other sources of news are now competing on a national and international level with all of the other stuff on the internet, and not on a regional level like they used to.  The point is that big time news sources, along with their credibility and the trust that we place in them, are under threat from a large number of smaller news publications online.

The emergence of these new news sources impacts the way that we consume news. Print and televised media used to be consumed at certain times of day in more constant settings: the evening news on the couch in the living room; the morning paper at the kitchen table with breakfast or on the subway to work. With online media, there is no stable timetable for news, only an insatiable desire for news to come faster and in real time. Articles and videos are consumed at all times of the day in many different places in small increments on smart phones and computers rather than at specific times in specific places. Last night, for example, I missed the debate and wanted to know what happened. Instead of waiting to read the morning paper or watch the news the next day, I just went on my phone when I got home from Lamont that night and was able to watch a debate recap that had already been put together.

The result is that news can not only be reported by anybody on various platforms, but also that news needs to be reported fast and in real time. Although the benefits to this trend allow us to consume news at our convenience and to learn whats happening as it happens, we also miss out on the thoroughness and reliability that used to be nearly taken for granted with any piece of news that we saw on a trusted platform. Today, even major news publications need to publish quickly in order to keep up, and the result is often hasty and incomplete news coverage. I remember watching the news a few years ago when a bunch of government documents were released, and the broadcasters were literally reporting on thousands of documents that had only been released about ten minutes prior. They were reporting news instantly, but nobody had even been able to read the documents in their entirety yet, let alone read them closely, speak to other sources, or come up with significant analysis. The result was a total mess, and an uninformative one at that. Good news needs time, and in the age of the internet I’m afraid that the reliable and thorough news that we need in order to stay properly informed will die out or diminish in favor of instant, real time scoops.

This week we finished our discussions of Where Wizards Stay Up Late and talked about the end to end argument which greatly influenced the way that networks were designed over the past few decades. In the same way that most things happen on the Internet these days, the evolution of the Internet grew faster and faster as more and more people got involved. What began as a small experiment involving only a few computer scientists with an esoteric dream quickly became a widely used phenomena with endless possibilities for all. Interestingly enough, despite beginning as a government initiative that would be expected to be very regimented and controlled in its growth, the Internet ultimately drew its greatest strength from its identity as a patchwork of multiple ideas and experiments, the best of which won out and were adopted by majorities of users in an intellectual free market of sorts. It was an excellent space of innovation.

I enjoyed reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late, and one of the reasons that it was a good read for me was because it wasn’t just the story and history of the Internet, but also of the people who created it. In the process of creating something that forever altered human intimacy and interaction, the founders of the Internet created for themselves a strong community full of camaraderie, challenge and friendship that is certainly deserving of admiration. The epilogue to the book served as the culmination of this thread of community, and there was something pleasing about reading it, almost like the end of a children’s story: with a future of boundless possibilities ahead, the suddenly aging protagonists gathered to recall the glory days that started it all, their excitement, their discoveries, and their youth.

Indeed, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, sparks a nostalgia for the early days of networking when machines were new, exciting, and far more primitive than the overwhelming supply of computers we have today. The possibilities were limitless and unknown, the times were simpler, and there was a fresh excitement in the air. It was the frontier of the digital age, and the men who dared adventure into the unknown were pioneers, dreamers and heroes. Indeed, they were wizards. They performed the impossible. They paid no regard to their limitations.  They stayed up late into the the night, reminding us of our youth, our excitement, our passions.

When these wizards came together for their final hoorah, for their reunion, for the anniversary of their creation, the birthday of their now fully grown child, they came full circle to unite with us in our nostalgia, our wonder at their achievements, and our excitement for what is to come. They passed on the torch-or more accurately the wand-to all of the people they had inspired. Their dreams had become real, and new dreams were quickly coming to life.

Blog post 2 coming in a little late here, but better late than never, right.

This weeks discussion was about the second reading from Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which dealt mostly with the software that was designed for the internet. I thought that the most interesting part of the entire process was the community that was developed over the ARPANET throughout the course of its own refinement. Even though it was the first online community, a lot of the trends that have continued into the world of social media were already getting under way. It was nice to see friendships built over the internet. One passage identifies several friendships that were cemented through online discussions and continued for years before the friends actually met in real life. On the other hand, many of the negative elements of internet communication started to develop in the ARPANET community as well. The concept of flaming, which would never actually happen in real life, was born on the ARPANET, and many of the users spoke to each other in ways that would be considered extremely rude in real life. There is something about speaking through a screen that lacks the same kind of respect and connection necessitated by face to face conversation. The users of the ARPANET were the first to discover this unfortunate truth.

Another part of the readings that I found interesting but that did not come up in class was how the people at BBN dealt with the failures of Honeywell to produce proper computers for the IMP’s. When Honeywell produced the first several subpar machines despite repeated instructions from BBN, the IMP team simply accepted the machines and fixed them up themselves with seemingly no complaint. This kind of behavior was ironically very pre-internet of them. Today when a product arrives that is unsatisfactory, we generally ship it back and order a new one, especially from online services like amazon prime. The internet gives us variety and options, and makes it easy for us to browse and find exactly what we are looking for. Our specifications and demands are therefore very particular, and we have little tolerance for any mistakes. The BBN team’s persistance was very admirable though. When Honeywell gave them lemons, they put their heads down and got to work making lemonade. When Severo Ornstein finally did reject the poorly made Honeywell computer, I was a little relieved though. It was frustrating to see such hard workers continually supplied with products that were assembled with laziness and sloppy work. It was definitely the right decision to reject the delivery, and Honeywell reacted by stepping up its product.

I haven’t written a blog before, so this will be my first ever blog entry on the internet, which is what this blog will actually be about: the history and future of the internet in society. Ironically, I’m composing this entry in Microsoft word. I’ll copy and paste it into the blog when I’m finished. I am a bit traditional in that sense; I prefer a plain typeface and the more classical feeling of typing on a piece of paper, and writing in word comes much closer to those things than writing directly onto the internet itself. I also felt the need to file these entries in a folder on my hard drive (which I do with all of my other assignments), rather than store the record entirely on the internet.

This kind of weariness towards the internet (and social media) and preference for more traditional methods will be kind of a theme in this blog, and was one of my reasons for my choosing to take “What is the Internet and What Will It Become?”, the freshman seminar for which I am writing it. As I wrote in my application to the class, “The Internet makes me nervous.” For a whole lot of reasons that you would probably want to know as a reader of this post and any of my future blogs. Here are a few:

• The internet takes up too large a role in our lives and we are too dependent on it.
• Social media hinders genuine social interaction.
• Time spent developing hobbies and a sense of discovery is now spent in front of screens.
• The internet allows the government and other entities to collect huge amounts of information on people’s lives.
• Privacy on the internet does not really exist.

Part of my reason for taking this class was to learn more about what the internet actually is in order to better understand my concerns. Another reason was to consider where the internet is going, and to question if society risks leaving anything behind as the internet continues to progress and to dominate daily life.

Our seminar began with a book called “Where Wizards Stay Up Late”, which was the story of how the internet-originally the ARPAnet after a pentagon agency called ARPA- came to be. The first half of the book (which I had the misfortune of having to read in a single, 3 hour block) was actually very interesting. The internet began as a series of landlines connected by the phone company, and the creative innovations of its founders were indeed remarkable. Most interesting, though, were the visions of the men who worked to make the internet a reality. Bob Taylor, for example, saw a world in which all computers were connected and spoke the same language. JCR Licklider uncannily imagined a kind of man-machine symbiosis wherein each would depend on the other, but in doing so would achieve new levels of productivity and success. Both visions were pretty spot on, almost to a frightening degree, especially in the case of Licklider’s symbiosis. Although he may not have foreseen the details of his predicted man-machine relationship, Licklider was very right about people and computers living almost as one. Today, people lean on their computers (and phones) as much for pleasure as for work and productivity, if not more. Indeed, aspects of our identities today are tied into our phones and social media accounts, and as the viewers and authors of countless online texts, part of our self worth has to do with how successful we are at being cool online. Scientific studies even show that hearing the ping from a text message or another social media account stimulates the same biological reactions of pleasure as genuine social interaction, and that the degree to which people like photos that they post or see online is dependent on how many digital likes that post receives. Scary stuff. The relationship is truly real, but whether it is symbiotic or parasitic is certainly in much greater question today.