[Air-l] Internet History/Stages, was Internet in Everyday Life

david silver dsilver at u.washington.edu
Mon Nov 25 16:12:30 PST 2002


Hi Folks,

i just returned after giving a class lecture which featured an abbreviated
history of the internet and found barry's post quite interesting.  besides
information about his and caroline haythornthwaite's book, he included the
following excerpt from the introduction:

***

Excerpts from the Editors' Introduction,
Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornthwaite:

_The Internet in Everyday Life_ is about the second age of the Internet as
it descends from the firmament and becomes embedded in everyday life. The
first age of the Internet was a bright light shining above everyday
concerns. In the euphoria, many analysts lost their perspective. The rapid
contraction of the dot.com economy has brought down to earth the
once-euphoric belief in the infinite possibility of Internet life.

***

i'm curious about this notion of two stages of the internet.  if i'm
reading the paragraph correctly, the authors suggest the net has had two
stages: before and after the dot.com crash.  i'm interested in hearing
what others think about this concept of a two-staged internet history.

in my own lecture this morning, i tracked a number of stages, all of which
contain, i believe, significant differences between them.  for example
(and this is the abridged version):

1960s/early 1970s - ARPANET

1975 - a more social internet with lists like SF-Lovers

1979 - a more public internet (here i'm defining the internet more
expansively) with the introduction of usenet groups

late 1980s/early 1990s - mass influx of users via prodigy/compuserve/aol

1991 - a more distributive (and later graphical) turn with berners-lee's
world wide web, followed by mosaic (1993), and netscape (1994)

1995 - netscape goes public, wall street goes crazy, dot.com daze begins

etc etc etc.

(like all historical stages, these are complex and reflect an interesting
intersection among social and cultural contexts, technological
developments, economic conditions, etc.)

thoughts?

david silver
http://faculty.washington.edu/dsilver/





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