#blogpost2 com311 digitalmediaculture

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The Evolution of the Internet

Tim O’Reilly and James Curran, in both their pieces, explore the evolution of the Internet from its origins to the cyberspace we know today.

The dot-com bubble is how Tim O’Reilly, in his article “What is Web 2.0”, defines the turning point in the infrastructure of the Internet. Before the 1990s, commercial activities on the Internet were banned and, up to that point, the Internet was a free space that nobody owned.

The end of the ban on commercial activities in the 1990s constitutes a massive change, which was accompanied by a great enthusiasm. Everyone was investing in this market until it crashed because it was a giant market to sustain.

The Internet, at this point, needs to be upgraded in order to survive – from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Before the crash, the business model was mainly about selling content; it shifted to a new one: collection of data from users. For example, Netscape had a browser-centered strategy in order to establish a market for high-priced server products. Google, on the contrary, had a data-centered strategy for which the content was given for free and they collected data from users.

Web 2.0 is based upon some principles:

1)    Exploiting collective intelligence – Wikipedia vs. Britannica. On the one hand, Britannica is an online encyclopedia based upon the principle that only experts are able to write articles. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is an online collaborative encyclopedia which is able to crowd a collective of people. In fact, “wiki” is the name for an open document where many people can work on it together.

2)    Context instead of content – What is important is the environment in which the content appears, not content per se anymore.

3)    Folksonomy instead of taxonomy – the crowd counts. Folksonomy is a classification made by people whereas taxonomy is a classification made by experts.

4)    Data management – in the new business model of Web 2.0 a person’s identity is important since data are key in this market.

by Aaron Fernandez, Pinterest

James Curran, in the second chapter of his book Misunderstanding the Internet, narrates the history of Internet from its roots that we can find in the US military environment of the Cold War. Indeed, the Internet was born as a military system capable of withstanding attacks from the Soviet Union. The key aspect of this system was the fact that it had not a center; therefore, it was both difficult to destroy and to control. The objects of the military were subsequently mediated by scientists which created a strong relationship between the two. The contribution of academic science is really important in the development of the early Internet; however, it took the form of expert-access rather than opening up to mass consumption.

What influences a following development of the Internet was the American counterculture during the 1980s like the hippies. The hippy sub-culture was based on the fact that individuals needed self-realization by breaking free from repressive conventions. During the early 1990s, a cult was created around text-based adventure games in which participants could take on assumed identities and interact with others, freed from the visual markers of age, gender, ethnicity, class and disability. A space in which people could explore their real selves and build empathy with others.” [The counterculture] transformed the internet from being a tool of a techno-elite into becoming the creator of virtual communities, a sub-cultural playground and agency of democracy” (40)

Another influence on the development of the Internet is the European tradition of public welfare. The world wide web (www) was created by Tim Berners-Lee, English computer scientist, who was inspired by two ideas: making possible an access to public good and bringing people in communion with each other. He was inspired, indeed, by the idea of serving society rather than self.

A turning point of the Internet is the end of the ban on commercial activities in 1991 which encouraged the launch of browsers that made web user-friendly. The commercialization of the Internet seemed to extend the benefits of the cyberspace to more and more people and, as a consequence, it created a new way of making money, expressing individuality, and communicating.

However, it had side effects. Before the commercialization, the Internet was space with freely distributed content but, at that moment, it was transformed in a space where selling and advertising were a dominant part of it. It also ended its collaborative tradition: in 1976, in fact, the Copyright Act was extended also to software.

The commercialization of the Internet created forms of control based on surveillance technology and market power. Surveillance technology collects, with different methods, data from users. It was at the beginning for marketing purposes only, but it soon started to be used in other ways. For example, firms were controlling their workforce’s use of the internet and autocratic governments used this technology to monitor and censor the Internet.

Market power: by 2011 Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle had a dominant position in various sectors of the Internet which made them able to be restrictive in many ways.

by Francesco Ciccolella, Pinterest

 The commercialization of the Internet opened the doors of the cyberspace to a global community, however, the control of data and surveillance technology reduce freedom of its users.