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

[Ulla Bunz]

last week at the national communication association Steve Jones was featured in a keynote conversation. He talked about "internet" versus "Internet." 

Steve, are you willing to repeat the main thoughts here briefly?

Ulla


> 
> From: david silver <dsilver at u.washington.edu>
> Date: 2002/11/25 Mon PM 07:12:30 EST
> To: air-l at aoir.org
> Subject: [Air-l] Internet History/Stages, was Internet in Everyday Life
> 
> 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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