Birth of the Internet
1994 is very clear in my memory. I was quite literally stepping out into a new world myself, having just graduated from college. I was very interested in the latest developments in technology because my student discount at the University of Oregon bookstore was about to expire, and many of my friends were computer science majors at the time. So I distinctly remember a computer station set up to demonstrate Mosaic. It was the first internet browser in history, and even then you could type in "www." whatever you wanted. There were few places to visit, nor did most of them look particularly interesting. But it was all right there.
As someone who had hacked around the FTP networks and chat forums – thanks to my computer buddies and our connections in the computer gaming community – I instantly recognized how much more useful and easier this was. I think it was clear to everyone that browsers would be a much friendlier way to use the new internet. Soon after, the Netscape browser was introduced, and with more and more people posting their own websites, the internet began to assume the shape it has today, a simple, easy way to access a massive community around the world. I think only a few people, if anyone, realized what this would really mean. 1994 was the same year that Tim Berners-Lee – the creator of the World Wide Web in 1990 – founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a group of scientists and major technology company representatives dedicated to creating standards for the new web.
Bringing people together and allowing them to collaborate in new and powerful ways has been a key theme in the development of all eras: cities and careers in the Formative Era, literacy and education in the Ancient Era, religion in the Medieval Era, nationalism and mass printing in the Renaissance, realism in the Industrial Era, mass communication and mass culture in the Mechanized Era, and the internet in the Information Era. Even in this list of achievements the Internet stands out. The development of widespread literacy in the Ancient Era and the printing industry in the Renaissance may be the only other transformations like it. Yet as an avenue for the publication of new information, the Internet is quickly assuming the proportions of an online library with 24 / 7 availability to everyone in their own homes. The now dizzying variety of information available makes it clear that in the future, human knowledge will be primarily accessed through this and whatever successor technologies emerge in the future. By storing everything in one place, the Internet is making it possible for knowledge possessed by only a single person somewhere on Earth to be known by anyone who needs that information with the touch of a button.
Even with its ease of use, the Internet is also unprecedented in its ability to serve as a platform for the delivery of entire mediums. If the medium is the message, the Internet speaks volumes. As various mediums convert to using digital technology, each medium becomes compatible with internet transmission. Thus the TV set used for television, the radio boombox used for radio broadcasts, the movie theater used for movies, applications and FTP servers used for computer code (used online in an application or provided as source code for download), the newspapers and magazines used for print (which is now typically written in digital word processing files), and media players for multimedia files (audio and / or video) are all capable of being delivered to anyone, anywhere using the Internet and an internet browser.
The ease of use and the accessibility of so many different kinds of content would have been unthinkable... Was unthinkable just a few years ago. And every day new uses, new functions, new applications, and new content are joining the web. The only thing that is certain is the no one can see where this will end or all the ways in which this invention will transform – and assist other developments in transforming – society in the future. It is the single most powerful tool for the exchange of information in history, the dominant force transforming how we learn, how we work, and how we play in the 21st century. It is the Internet that defines the beginning of the Information Era.
It is difficult to convey the sense in which this has changed how we think about our world. We used to have libraries filled with the treasures of lifetimes of other civilizations. Now it is all at our fingertips. When I was a child, my parents would have friends over for dinner and inevitably the same snippet of conversation would appear once or twice throughout each party. "Do you remember the guy on that TV show?" "Yeah, what was his name?" or "When did Texas Instruments develop the first silicon chip?" "I'm not sure, I can look it up when I get home. I have a book on the early history of computing." These questions went unanswered 99% of the time. The same conversations were had by Formative Era Sumerian friends trying to remember the last great flood or when a particularly nasty rival ruler died. The same conversations were had by me and my friends in college in 1994. However, in the 21st century, there's no such thing as a quiz you can't pass. With a computer in almost every home and a palm computer in many people's pockets, the answer to any question is just seconds away. While science fiction writers have written of cyborgs with computers built into their brains, we have already developed the Internet to the point where it serves as a backup memory for any person with internet access. It is virtually impossible today to "forget" anything when you need it because it can so easily be "remembered" off the Internet (whether you even knew the information before or not).
The Web 2.0 Movement
The Internet has even redefined business and power in the 21st century. While initially used by large corporations to consolidate their power and control as they had always done in the Mechanized Era, new concepts in communication and interaction emerged in the Information Era called Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 movement defined a new paradigm where a website or web application's users were not merely passive recipients of television or other media signals; users became content authors and the communication became not just one-way (corporate to user) or two-way (also user to corporate) but multi-way (including users to users). While each company made its own choices about how much control it demanded, internet giants like Amazon and eBay were built almost overnight to rival the largest Mechanized Era corporation. They leveraged the power of their users by building platforms which allowed their users to interact more or less directly in the business, a community-building technique termed social networking.
While these companies yielded a tremendous amount of control over corporate messaging to their users, their ability to grow made a clear statement that tremendous rewards were available to insightful businesses that were willing to be part of a conversation rather than simply dictating to their customers. And yet this should not be construed as an indication that the web had completely opened up the world. Control over key internet addresses (URLs or domain names) gave certain websites the ability to monopolize their industry and dominate their competition. No one did anything illegal or in anyway undercut their competition, but the possession of the right name or being first and popular for an emerging industry or service allowed the ease of arriving at a website (as opposed to its rivals) a virtual monopoly on the industry. This is how a small internet search engine company called Google snowballed its growing popularity into internet mega-dominance along with the leading technology industry titans like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, and Sun Microsystems.