At 40, the Internet still reshaping history
At the time, it would have been hard to predict which of these events 40 years ago would prove to be most momentous:
• Humans step out of a spaceship and walk on the moon.
• The Woodstock concert becomes a seminal cultural moment for the baby-boomer generation.
• A New York City police raid leads to the Stonewall riots and modern gay-rights movement.
• A handful of engineers at UCLA send some data from one computer to another.
You may disagree, but in my opinion, it's the last of the list: four decades ago today, the Internet was born.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say some important seeds of the Internet sprouted with that data transfer on September 2, 1969. There's plenty of debate about when the Internet was actually born, but one thing is certain: it's been a constant work in progress.
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It began as a Defense Department-funded project called Arpanet that drew on plenty of research elsewhere. It grew to offer a useful electronic mechanism to send mail, then the virtual real estate of World Wide Web, then a backbone for commerce, and now a core part of globe-spanning social activity. And it's well on its way to becoming the foundation for how the world's population uses computers.
Woodstock embodied the rising power of a new generation. Stonewall opened the door to a radical reshaping of morality. Men on the moon showed us how small the Earth is. But the Internet changes everything--and it will be instrumental in the next chapters of humanity's future.
The global community
I've been moved since childhood at how Apollo 11 photographs of Earthrise as viewed from the moon make my planet seem a single entity rather than a bunch of squabbling factions of humanity. But because of its practical effects, the Internet has done more to unify the world.
That's because the Internet has enabled communities based on interests, not geography. Latin speakers, macro photographers, Philip K. Dick fans, and college roommates can stay in touch with their respective peers. Jets, phones, and letters made this possible before, but the Internet builds it into daily life so it's as ordinary as going shopping.
Likewise, the Internet has given a megaphone to many who had none before--protesters in Iran and Myanmar are recent examples in which the people were able to comprehend what was going on in hard-to-see parts of the world and decide for themselves whether they liked it or not.
The Net has enabled more than just talk, of course. The Net powers a huge amount of commerce, whether it's buying songs over Apple's iTunes, hiring cheap labor through Amazon's Mechanical Turk, or managing the supply chain of inventory used to build cars.
In its early years, there were objections to the arrival of the profit motive on the Net, but that transformation out of academia has been one of its greatest assets. Economic ties are powerful and often durable, and corporations are willing to pay real money to make sure the infrastructure they're using stays up and running.
There now are 226 million Web sites registered for use.
(Credit: Netcraft)The Internet itself is a mind-boggling complex overlay of technologies that spans every level from steering photos down a glass fiber to showing where your friends are on a dynamically generated map. But the first half of its 40 years were spent largely in obscurity.
Its early years involved just a relative handful of computers sending data to one another over increasingly large distances. The 1970s brought a key innovation, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that governs how data is broken down into packets, routed across numerous networking devices, and reassembled into their original form at the other end of the pipe.
In the 1980s, e-mail started blossoming in earnest as a killer application for the Internet, and the World Wide Web arrived in the 1990s. These innovations vaulted the Internet from academia into the mainstream. Exploding popularity led to companies that sold Internet access, equipment, and services--and the first dot-com bubble.
The bursting of that bubble was cataclysmic in the industry, but it was a mere blip in the Internet's history. According to Netcraft, there were 226 million Web sites in August, nearly 10 times the number around when the bubble burst. Google filled the void left by the collapsed start-ups with a powerfully profitable business making sense of the Internet's information chaos.
What's perhaps notable about the Internet is how organic it is. In the short term, there are plenty of disruptions as one company or another suffers problems or technology can't match new demands. But in the long run, the system continues to function as researchers, computing companies, standards groups, and start-ups constantly upgrade the infrastructure and offer new reasons to use it.
The next phase of growth is through cloud computing, in which people use software that's housed on the Net rather than on their own machines. Giant farms of servers house the applications people use, making them available to personal computers and mobile phones today and in-car computers and other devices tomorrow.
Today's cloud computing applications are primitive compared to PC-based equivalents, but the browser is evolving to meet the new demands with accelerated graphics, much of the native power of a PC's processor, and maturing programming tools. That increased power fuels the arrival of more sophisticated applications.
The dark side
The Net is by no means perfect or universally beneficial.
The ease with which it's enabled communications has led to a series of new conduits--e-mails, instant messages, blog posts distributed over RSS, tweets, and Facebook updates. That's handy for keeping in touch, but it also means people must grapple with a constantly shifting collection of oversaturated communication conduits.
Sifting the signal from the noise can be nearly impossible--and that's before dealing with the spam.
The Net also has brought with it plenty of new crime, facilitating identity theft and financial scams. Stalking has never been easier, and distributed denial-of-service attacks by armies of compromised computers can cripple a business' operations.
I acutely feel the financial pains of journalism that arrived when the Internet brought an oversupply of news. Arguably, the ever-shrinking number of reporters is offset by the arrival of new voices and the ease of tracking what's going on, but I share the concerns about the waning power of the press to uncover corruption or other problems.
The Net also has fueled the globalization that led to job losses and resentment as expensive labor in wealthier countries was replaced by cheaper workers elsewhere.
The most worrisome issues I see stem from problems people themselves have adapting to social interaction on the Net.
It seems our brains are hard-wired for a social circle about the size of a tribe, but now parts of our lives are on display to the whole world. Just closing your curtains now won't get you privacy, and good luck teaching Facebook's information sharing mechanisms to somebody not steeped in the subtleties of the social graph.
The Internet can abet governmental censorship and propaganda efforts, too. My gut instinct tells me that the Net's power to disseminate information--especially when augmented by technology such as Google Translate--ultimately will prevail, but it's not a sure thing.
So the Internet poses plenty of problems. But it's only gaining in importance, power, and reach, so my advice is to embrace it and try to shape it for the better for the next 40 years.
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
This is why Fedzilla's bill to give the Chairman "emergency powers" over internet providers and the ability to order their shutdown is wrong on so many levels. With TV, newspapers, and Hollywood cheering nonstop, the internet is the only real voice of dissent against the continual government takeovers & controls.
It may not be able to DO much, but the power to spread ideas among liberty-seeking individuals will be a thorn in the side of The Party and its Anointed Ones.
So over all I would say that the Internet protects us from the worst abuses of tyrants or at least exposes them for what they are and thus makes it harder for them to operate in darkness and with impunity as they did in the past.
Not to say the internet can not fool people, after all Iraq was invaded because of WMD even though there was plenty of evidence that they did not have any.
People tend to take things for granted, and are usually too lazy to really explore a topic and get a broader view about it. Rumors and lies turn into facts.
The same happens in every media, but I think that on the internet this happens more often.
Government's censorship occurs in a lot of countries (China, Iran, etc.), which helps these governments to control what their citizens are expose too.
But as other commentators mentioned, the internet gives people a way to express themselves, and share their views and ideas with others. So in some ways, theoretically it'll be easier for totalitarian governments to censorship the information, but on the other side it makes easier for common people to bypass this censorship. Just look what happened in Iran (not that it helped the opposition a lot at the end... they were crashed by the government's thugs).
1) Prague Spring (Feb '68)
2) French May (May '68)
3) Mexico's Tlatelolco massacre (Oct '68)
all those events set the stage for the '69.
As we now know, most event of 1960's didn't have a immediate impact until well over 20 years later. Think Woodstock, think gay rights, think minorities rights and also think the Arpanet.
BTW: Only for Americans does the lunar landing had any impact whatsoever. In real terms, the Lunar mission was more of a long term disappointment, than what it promised. Just watch "2001 a space odyssey" and you can see that space travel promised more than it could deliver in a 30 to 40 year spectrum.
I have a U.S.-centric worldview to be sure, but I think the moon landing did have a certain global influence. The whole program was rather an element of the very international Cold War. I'm one of those pessimists who doesn't see a glorious future for space flight, but I do find the moon landings inspiring. And they did it all without metric measurements!
I have electric heat now and I don't worry about it all that much. I can always throw on another blanket.
Agreed. What's different now, though, is that instead of being limited to the tribes into which we're born, we're able to create our own tribes which now often consist of people from around the world who bring with them the distinctiveness of their cultures, different views and ideas. It's kind of awesome really because it's this new tribalism which helped Tim Berners-Lee collaborate with others around the world and across the internet, through Usenet, to create the protocol we all use today...the world wide web.
There is no 'downside' in this in the slightest. There are only upsides and upsides that have been twisted into downsides, much like with various drugs and 'illegal' drugs.
Good point but actually we have an innate need to connect beyond our tribe - that's what us makes us feel part of the big world and the net has erased any barriers or borders. A new book called Consequential Strangers speaks to that very subject and although there are many dangers on the net - there are many dangers in the "real" world too. www.consequentialstrangers.com
The internet is a great place to look up stuff, communicate with people from every where and anywhere, play games, become more involved, oh and to see if what you think you know stands up to reality; we forget that and that's it's true power. I do not consider Woodstock anything more than a great musical event, but the Internet and the Apollo moon landing come on now they both are big time and both have had the potential to move us forward, whether from a social point or a technology mega storm. What needs to continue in our thoughts is with great strength from this stuff comes greater responsibility of it's worth and right now the internet is still a baby learning to adapt to it's surroundings. It is said it takes a villiage to raise a child and the internet is ours. Let's hope we do right bye it. We will see in the next 40 or more yrs what it really becomes
- by VolTroN5000 September 7, 2009 6:56 PM PDT
- *** is the internet ? But in reality the internet we use today came out in 1995 or so... I mean really, who the hell used it before that?
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