It was very interesting thinking of how the Internet became
what it is now. What was the necessity for which Internet was created? Has it
been always as social as it is now? As we think about these questions, we need
to start from the fist Internet generation. After reading this first part,
specially the second chapter, I started thinking of Internet as a process of
continuous change and development. Just like Reed explains, it all started by
being a military and academic source during the ‘70s and ‘80s. At this point it
would be extremity rare, with the only purpose of helping the military and
educational system. As everything, it was not as popular in the beginning, as
it is now. In the late ‘80s Internet was continuously used for educational, but
now also was valuable in the scientific world. In the early ‘90s, as Reed says,
the “avant-garde countercultural internet appeared and started the big change
to the personal and social world. In the middle of the ‘90s, “an emergent
public internet” came to life, and brought more popularity than it had ever
had. The commercial internet appeared in the late ’90s and showed to the
industrial world how beneficial it can be. After this, and progressively, the domesticated
internet started showing up, and now a day, in a lot of culture, this is a
normal and essential thing to have. In the early 2000s the interactive internet
came along and since then it has become an indispensable function to have in
our homes, and even on our mobile phones everywhere we go. This progression is
huge and coming from helping military service and education, to being a vital function
of every device we own, is more than a simple purpose/function shift.
I started thinking about how obvious this changes are and
how easily we can notice them around us. Watching different TV shows from the ‘70s
to now a day shows, can show us how the “entertainment” changed along the year,
and how we can’t live without internet anymore. Even shows that are long can be
great example, the famous FRIENDS are great for this, because at the beginning having
access to internet was a privilege, while at the end was much easier.
Creating the internet and keeping it “up to date” with all
the new stuff coming up is a hard function, but people have figured it out how
to manage it and we can never rely on staying on this “phase” of the internet,
because as I said earlier, it is a process, so it is going to change for sure.
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