The internet - history in progress

[RubyToogood]

I was just wondering how people feel the internet has changed - and how it's changed society - since they started using it. For instance, when I got my first internet connection it was mostly populated by young geeky blokes, and now a much more representative cross section of people are online. The internet seems to have become a much more normal part of everyday life for normal people - as a matter of course now people shop online, bank online, email their relatives regularly, look things up on google, make friends online. Predictions from just a few years ago look laughable, and in some ways it doesn't feel as though anything fundamental has changed, and yet the pace of change has been incredibly rapid. What effects has this had and where's it all going?

When you read books about the internet from a few years ago, they're all about MUDs and MOOs and Usenet and cyborgs - what happened to them then?

 

[zArk]

Check out World of Warcraft
IRC is still going
Communications are rife

The change over the last 5 years has been good and bad. File sharing is still happening and will not ever stop. I think the negativity is mainly emerging from marketing and advertising companies who are attempting to gain the dominance they enjoyed through the papers, radio, tv and cinema. Their days are gone.

If you wish to have a cracking read check out

digital imprimatur

Blogging has moved in, and on a few forums they have integrated Blogging to such an extent that it has replaced the previously inhabited domain of forums.
I think once you read the Digital Imprimatur, issues such as 'publishing' and blogging can alter perceptions of 'how it could be'.
I dont like the idea of using a server to store information i want others to read, i would prefer my computer being the host and publisher.

Snippet
Over the last two years I have become deeply and increasingly pessimistic about the future of liberty and freedom of speech, particularly in regard to the Internet. This is a complete reversal of the almost unbounded optimism I felt during the 1994-1999 period when public access to the Internet burgeoned and innovative new forms of communication appeared in rapid succession. In that epoch I was firmly convinced that universal access to the Internet would provide a countervailing force against the centralisation and concentration in government and the mass media which act to constrain freedom of expression and unrestricted access to information. Further, the Internet, properly used, could actually roll back government and corporate encroachment on individual freedom by allowing information to flow past the barriers erected by totalitarian or authoritarian governments and around the gatekeepers of the mainstream media.

 

[Bob_the_lost]

[random comment]
Anyone who bets on the internet instead of legislation is being foolish. All the government has to do is increase the controll they have over ISPs and the rest will follow...
[/random comment]

PS MOO was fantastic, i miss that game

 

[zArk]

I think Filmic representations of the internet have changed and in some way affect perceptions of the future for the internet/cyberspace

i.e
Tron
Wargames
Lawnmowerman
Hackers
13th Floor
Matrix

Does anyone remember Internet Time? where'd that idea go?

what about 3d glasses?

 

[rich!]

When you read books about the internet from a few years ago, they're all about MUDs and MOOs and Usenet and cyborgs - what happened to them then?

Well, the cyborg stuff was never about the internet. (Except very peripherally.)

MUDs and MOOs evolved into (partly) the commercial online game spaces, though there are still plenty of them around in their earlier form.


USENET? I use it every day for all kinds of things. It's a threaded messaging system that's worked well for decades, and you can get interfaces to it from all kinds of hardware. The biggest drawback to Usenet is that spam affects quite a lot of it quite badly.

 

[soulman]

I was just wondering how people feel the internet has changed - and how it's changed society - since they started using it. For instance, when I got my first internet connection it was mostly populated by young geeky blokes, and now a much more representative cross section of people are online. The internet seems to have become a much more normal part of everyday life for normal people - as a matter of course now people shop online, bank online, email their relatives regularly, look things up on google, make friends online. Predictions from just a few years ago look laughable, and in some ways it doesn't feel as though anything fundamental has changed, and yet the pace of change has been incredibly rapid. What effects has this had and where's it all going?

When you read books about the internet from a few years ago, they're all about MUDs and MOOs and Usenet and cyborgs - what happened to them then?

Still there and the ideas are being developed, often quietly, and with good reason sometimes. But too quietly in many cases IMHO. The crass nature of business interests can blot out the many and varied instances of mutual aid and free cooperation between people across boundaries. The recent thing with piratebay, and the support they received worldwide still amazes me in a good way. Can't resist a link to their graph for corporate lawyers who don't understand [it's at the bottom ] http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php

 

[trashpony]

I don't understand 90% of what's been posted up there ^^^. That's how it's moved on - people like me can understand it

 

[fudgefactorfive]

The major change for me has been the creeping commercialisation. When I first started using it, it still had the academic feel of its roots, with a soupçon of the homepage culture that later mutated into the "Blogosphere" (bleuuuurrrrghgghhhh). There were no banner ads. In those days, the internet was about 50% dry academic publications, 25% teeny tiny porn thumbnails and 25% Star Trek fan fiction. Now it's about 90% spam and 10% banner-ad-laden exercises in ego massage.

Despite that, it's definitely better as a reference source than ever before. I can barely imagine how different my school life would have been if I'd had access to this stuff then.

I think where it's going depends on many things. One thing I'm keeping an eye on is how the digital rights issues being kicked up (mostly over music copyright issues at the moment) are affecting the technology. Scary laws keep being proposed and (barely) being fought off. It's things like that which will shape the future IMO.

I think whether the lines between mobiles and PDAs continue to blur (ie. how much the internet moves off the desktop and into your pocket) is also interesting. I'm still paranoid that TV, radio, internet, cable and telephones will just merge into one big pipe, at which point, the state will slap an "information tax" on us all.

 

[soulman]

Maybe internet users should slap a user tax on state, business and corporate users of the internet? Now there's a thought.

 

[kyser_soze]

We're at the point where digital media and services are just starting to bed in and become geek-free zones - partly down to user interfaces improving, the natural evolution of services (e.g. photobucket) and what sites like myspace and youtude do is increase the 'network effect'.

The internet is a hugely disruptive technology and it goes deeper than websites - the whole technology model is affecting the way both business and groups think of their organisations, and the type of businesses and groups that can now exist and operate effectively (i.e. they can sell product/propogate their message) will start to change things.

Think about it - the printing press was the single most significant item of technology in driving the protestant reformation, mass literacy and ultimately the spreading of modern thought and thinking. The internet has yet to find it's equivalent of 'Ye Byble Yne Ynglyshe' but it will.

As for control...well governments thought they could control printing presses and access to 'seditious literature' and they haven't made a great fist of it over the centuries have they? Same thing will happen with the web.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Maybe internet users should slap a user tax on state, business and corporate users of the internet? Now there's a thought.

How?

 

[bonjour]

As I was saying to my friend the other day, the internet is one of human kinds greatest inventions.

 

[Donna Ferentes]

Is it?

When I was last at college about five years ago, studying (amongst other things) Information in Sociaty, everybody used to bang on about how this. being of an historical turn of mind, I used to ask: compared to what? To the invention of the internal combustion engine? The telephone? The television? The radio? Heavier-than-air flight? Printing? Fire?

 

[kyser_soze]

Writing, the printing press and the telephone. Radio and TV are part of the same technology analogue wireless transmission; the internet was the first medium to enable you to send text, sound, image and place primary control over content delivery in the hands of consumers.

Arguably the IC engine and powered HTA flight are of equal importance to us today, but in the future their use may well be curtailed/found to be a 'wrong turn' technologically. It's unlilkely that a distributed information network will ever be seen as a 'bad' thing, except by totalitarian governments.

And fire wasn't invented, we discovered how to make it and control it...

 

[Donna Ferentes]

I was thinking in terms of impact on human society. I wasn't being rhetorical though: I wasn't necessarily assuming these other things were less important. But it does seem to me that the internet is not only (to a large degree) a development of already-existing technology, but its impact on human society , though substantial, is not so great as some of the aforementioned.

 

[kyser_soze]

I think that might be down more to the fact that, even with our current level of technology it's extremely difficult to get the 'wow' factor going about something as mundane as the internet - ultimately it's a fusion of technologies and content rather than a substantial 'new' technology (I think the next 'wow' technology to come will be biotec - build your own angel glowing angel fish for example).

For me the internet is 'stealth wow' - it's impact isn't felt the same way as say, the IC engine but the internet and the technologies it's spawned have susbstnatially altered vast swathes of how things are done and what is now easily possible - remote medcine/consultation is one example that is small and unnoticed...until you need specialist assistance in a remote area and are helped by a specialist who is 2 time zones away over a laptop and wifi link. It's those kind of 'below the radar' applications that I think make the impact on people's lives.

Then of course you've got blogs, youtube, myspace, P2P...all of these are still in their infancy but already are cultural hotspots. That coupled with the begining of the end of top down media consumption, the opening up of political information, the ability to form quick active commuities globally...I don't think that any of the other technologies you mention reach so far and so deep into human existance as the internet.

So in summary...it's not a 'wow' technology so it doesn't have the kind of psychological impact of something like the IC engine, but it's affect is wider and deeper...

 

[Donna Ferentes]

remote medcine/consultation is one example that is small and unnoticed....

I'd have thought the helicopter may have played a rather greater role in bringing medical assistance to remote areas.

 

[kyser_soze]

Helicopters are expensive to run and maintain and aren't as portable as a laptop - plus you still need specialist medical help on hand, whereas with portable units you can have a specialist consultant online is what I mean. Anyhoo, it was just an example...

 

[rorymac]

Too many folks look stuff up on the internet and present what they find as gospel because it's written on a screen. There's a huge amount of ol toilet on the internet .. millions and millions of wrong answers to everything on the first 126 pages of every google search. Most folks get stupider by the day but they feel as though they are getting smarter. I don't .. :| !Tons and tons of search engines and sites that are totally useless. If you put them all together you'd have one huge rubbish site with millions of halfwits designing bridges that fall down, formulating theories that are incorrect. The pornography is all the same, all the puters make stupid clicking sounds and Billy Bragg and Johnny Depp,fuckin Flea, David Bowie .. all that lot love it .. but see how crap thay all are now compared to how crap they used to be. Stephen Fry gave his laptop to charity as did Claire Rayner. Jack Nicholson pretended he did .. you can tell by his films that he didn't.
Guiy Ritchie and Madonna, the dingaling from The Manic Street Preachers .. Carol Vorderman .. fuckin Goldie .. Moby and Robert Smith! :-/
A pattern is emerging but I had to run out of examples. I got 4 more names on a google .. Lars Elstrup, Giles Brandwaith, Charles Kennedy, Sarah Kennedy. These folks are ruining everything.
Elvis Costelloe .. definitely.

 

[kyser_soze]

And the internet bought Uncle Rory to a wider audience; recommendation surely?