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

[Steve Jones]

Email overload, I'm finally picking up threads of conversations from 
days ago....

In short, although my talk focused largely on issues related to 
immersive virtual reality, it began by discussing networks, and I did 
say that I thought it is time to abandon the notion of an "Internet" 
and think about an "internet." (With due respect for citation, this 
occurred to me after a lengthy phone conversation with Joe Turow in 
which he noted that other media are not capitalized.) The former I 
use to refer to the process, begun in the 1960s with U.S. government 
funding, of connecting computers and standardizing communication 
among them. The latter I use to refer to the networking of computers 
that may or, more importantly, may not rely on that process. In this 
latter category are included any type of networking project, from 
home networking to wireless network to cellular networks to Internet2 
and so on. In other words, _the Internet_ is an internet (i.e., 
internetwork) but _the internet_ is a medium akin to other media 
(e.g., television, radio, etc.).

The larger point was that use of the term "network" embedded in these 
is itself important, whether we are discussing the actual, as in 
hardware, software, etc., or more importantly when discussing the 
symbolic, as in the relatively recent popular use of networks as 
metaphors for everything from stock markets to relationships to 
biology. That's what made me strongly consider _internet_, for I've 
been reminded of the ways in which a signal point in the development 
of media is when we begin to use it symbolically and metaphorically 
to compare other aspects of life to it.

I expect to develop this further when I get to taking the talk and 
turning it into something publishable at some point, but in relation 
to the discussion at hand that's what Ulla was referring to, and 
while it doesn't really sort out the matter of "Internet eras," 
perhaps it does provide still another way to think about the 
development of the technology and its uses (symbolic and otherwise).

Thanks,
Sj

At 7:29 PM -0500 11/25/02, Ulla Bunz wrote:
>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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>
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