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

Lisa-Jane McGerty L.J.Mcgerty at Bradford.ac.uk
Fri Nov 29 04:24:25 PST 2002


Thanks to Steve for some thought-provoking comments. I've also recently
grappled with the issue of Internet/internet though for slightly different
reasons. In my PhD thesis (now almost completed) I abandoned early on the
use of Internet with the capital 'I', preferring instead to use 'internet'.
This was partly due to the fact that other media are not capitalised, as
Steve points out, and also that using the capitalised version somehow
implied that it is set apart from the everyday, that it should somehow stand
out or is mysterious. As my thesis is looking at everyday domestic uses of
the internet this seemed wrong. Also, using 'Internet' seemed somehow to
reify all the biases inherent in the early history of the technology (the
gender, class, and ethnic biases particularly) which I did not want to do.
So I now always use 'internet', although I always try to pin this down by
stating what I really mean by the term (i.e. am I just referring to the WWW,
or to other aspects of the wider global internet, or to some historical
interpretation of it, or whatever).

I just wanted to throw this in as this is the first time I've seen this
topic discussed anywhere!
Lisa

Lisa McGerty
Applied Social Sciences
University of Bradford, UK

----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Jones <sjones at uic.edu>
To: <air-l at aoir.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 28, 2002 12:32 AM
Subject: Re: [Air-l] Internet History/Stages, was Internet in Everyday Life


> 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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> >>  Air-l at aoir.org
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> >>
> >
> >
> >
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