Slideshow posted

See sidebar to view slideshow. To control the slideshow manually, simply pause autoplay and click to advance slides.

Blog 8: The Digital Future

And just like that, we’re already done with Johnny Ryan’s A History of the Internet. I’m honestly surprised, looking at this book before this class started, I thought this would be a title we would cover for an extended amount of time, seeing as it went so in depth with the history of things. Guess looks can be deceiving.

Well, anyways, the final three chapters more-or-less look at the internet’s future. Or rather the possible future, since we have yet to find a way to see into the future. Various idea’s about what the internet has done in the past are brought up, from connections to media to politics. Since this book was published in 2010, we do see that some assumptions the book had made were right. Sociality via gaming and other services has definitely boomed, and now it’s just expected that politics will include internet tools, even if a candidate is well off enough to fund an extravagant campaign the old fashion way. The topic I found most interesting was the discussion covered in the final chapter, involving Google’s relationship with China.

As the book stated, Google has always had a “do no evil” approach when it comes to business, and this mindset has been trouble for them when it comes to China’s regulations and the already existing chinese search engine, Baidu. Despite having the ability to take their business elsewhere, Google still wants to have a branch in the country as they worry about the ramifications of leaving an area with a ton of potential in the internet department. Usually, Google can do pretty much whatever they want since they have their business to back them up if financial issues come up; they’ve shown this multiple times now, going into technological areas that have little to do with search engines. The fact that even they were hesitant to completely take their services out of the country means they must be worried that the internet’s future will involve the growing of digital use in areas where it’s currently limited, and Google doesn’t want to miss out on it.

Hopefully pre-internet establishments see this as an example of the importance of the internet, and, as the book states in page 197, “...weigh the prospect of failure” to support it in the future.

Questions

• What other area’s of our life could the internet become a part of in the future?
• Do you think restrictions on the internet will improve or worsen as time goes on?

Image from: http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/programme/challenge1_en.html

Blog 7: The Calm Before the Storm

In chapters 8, 9, and 10, we start to see the internet be used by the public at large. With the help of the world wide web and web browsers, internet usage began to become more of a common thing in society, though it would still be a while before it reached the level of use it has today. Mainly because many people still didn’t really see the practical use of the service.

I’ve already talked about how I thought it was interesting that AT&T had little interest on the digital tool that was the early internet, but to see so many companies as well as most people not see how powerful and practical it could be is staggering! It could be that AT&T others just didn’t see an immediate benefit from supporting such a service, but so many people were uninterested in it that I can’t help but think there’s more to it. Maybe people weren’t to sure on how the service worked and didn’t want to spend time to learn how to use it? Or maybe it could just be people becoming resistant to change since so much technology was advancing at the time; to the point that by the time a person purchased or learned how to use a then new tool, an updated version of it was already becoming popular?

I know I must sound like a broken record at this point, seeing as I’ve covered this obliviousness to the web for the 3rd time now, but I’m just so surprised that people didn’t pick up on the digital revolution for as long as this book has stated. Inevitably stuff like JenniCam and the general dot-com boom was what seemed to get the public onboard, and good thing to. With the launch of the Web 2.0, the internet as we know it finally started to appear.

With that, I leave you with the video below, which covers one of the few times that the internet was covered publically back then. It doesn’t exactly line up with the time period we are currently in, but it does show what the general environment was like for “internet engineers” in the early days of the internet.

Click to view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7hIQhkzgyc&feature=youtu.be

Questions

• What other reasons could there be for people to resist adopting the internet?
• If the U of M had continued progress of the Gopher browser proper, do you think the university’s focus on digital technology would be more prominent?

Image from: http://www.internet-history.info/communications-revolutions/arpanet-internet.html

Blog 6: Connections

In this section of Johnny’s writing, communication between those of the early internet were talked about, and the concept of connections was brought up overall. As you’ll see in the end of this post, this actually connects to our recent discussions in class as well (pun intended).

In terms of business, issues arose when large phone line companies like AT&T seem to refuse, or at the least be very hesitant, to introduce connections to the internet through their system. I mentioned something similar in the previous blog, but this does show how these corporations don’t want to take risks when they already have a set in stone system. This, as a result, meant that AT&T were inadvertently against innovation that involved their services. That’s not to say that any and all new ideas that headed their way were ignored, I have no way to prove such a statement, and after all their company could only get as big as they had if some sort of new concept had given them an edge over others. But if cases as simple as the ‘Carterfone’ mentioned on page 67 are anything to go by, at the very least AT&T was against any innovation that didn’t have a clear immediate benefit toward the company.

Connections were also brought up in terms of communication between people. Those in the field were starting to realize that the internet might one day allow those of any distance from one another to be able to communicate as though they were nearby. Though this is true today, there is something brought up about the topic that peaked my interest. If I may quote the quote from page 76 of the book: “In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face…” The context that this quote was made was about how communicating with others long distance will be easier, but nowadays this statement has gained a second meaning. As we talked about in class, we’ve now seen that a side effect of talking through text on the internet so often has made some people struggle when communicating by traditional means. Face to face interaction is more rare in this field, so cases where people struggle to communicate when actually near to one another has been occurring more often. In hindsight it looks like this hope from early internet enthusiasts became more true than they may’ve wanted.

Questions

• Could this communication issue get worse as technology advances further?
• Should restrictions on internet usage by younger individuals be more commonplace so as to remedy this situation for future generations? If so, does this go against the idea that anyone should be able to use the internet at anytime?

Image from: http://milfordoh.org/milford-ohio-internet-connection/

Blog 5: New Book, Old News (Warning: VERY long post)

Entering new territory with this entry, we now head into Johnny Ryan’s A History of the Internet and the Digital Future. This title looks to take a more objective approach to describing the internet then Andrew’s title did, which I have to say does make the history lessons sneaked into the reading more understandable.

As I have hinted at in previous entries, I wasn’t really a fan of how Andrew would take sudden detours to talk about the history of a place before talking about it’s connection to the internet, but I do understand that he was trying to connect a location’s internet purpose nowadays to it’s purpose in the past; showing that they’re not that different. With Jonny’s book though, it would appear that the entire purpose of the piece is to talk about world history as it relates to the internet (or at least that’s what I got out of phase 1) leading to the talk of the past having a clearer purpose to it overall. With that said, a lot of information was given in phase 1 of the book, and I must be honest, I had a bit of trouble remembering all of the/choosing a particular bit of the information in the section to talk about. As such, for the sake of getting these idea’s out there, I’ll just quickly mention some random thoughts that came up as I was reading.

The initial reason for the internet’s creation has already been addressed before, but I still find it interesting that it was originally meant to be used in case a nuclear attack were to be launched. That, plus how it was originally meant to be used by the government only, really does throw me for a loop every time as it sounds like something you’d hear in a science fiction film. Maybe that’s where these kinds of films get that idea?

Sending information in packets is one of the most basic concepts of how the internet works, and I’m surprised that there was originally trouble trying to get this idea off the ground at first. It really does show how all great ideas have to struggle in order to be recognized for their value.

I thought it was funny how AT&T originally was against what is now one of the most world renown tools of this millennium. It understandable why they were that way - they were already comfortable with how they were doing things and didn’t want to take risks - but seeing as they and everyone else on the planet now uses the internet, I can’t help but wonder if they’re a bit embarrassed to say they didn’t want to support it back then.

Finally, I thought it was neat to hear that it was around this time period that the first video games (or computer games, as they are called in the book) started to appear, as well as the concept of hackers. Both of these things are now very prominent on the internet, and it’s hard to imagine an internet without these two t. Though it does make logical sense that hackers would begin appearing at the internet’s inception, I didn’t realize that gaming did as well. I always thought that video games being talked about online so often was just a coincidence of timing - that video games just so happen to burst in popularity when the internet started to become more of a common tool for people to utilize. Now knowing this, I guess gaming in a way was always destined to be so popular online.

Questions

• How do you like how this book handles the historical aspect in comparison to Andrew’s title?
• With the rise of computing and the internet, do you think there are any aspects of our lives that should be flat out replaced by these tools?

Image from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_symbol.svg

Blog 4: Secrets till the End

With this blog post, Andrew’s journey through and for the internet comes to a close as we finally finish Tubes. In these final chapters focus is given on the data centers of the internet, most notably that of Design LLC (Google) and Facebook.

Reading chapter 7 I had mixed feelings of being surprised and disappointed, but also thinking this was expected considering the situation. Google’s choice in keeping everything hush about its inner workings is a bit of a let down, as it usually is the case that this company likes (and ultimately works in the business of) sharing information. It does seem like a bit of a double standard for them to want to share information about others while wanting to keep themselves secret - or at least part of themselves. Ultimately though it isn’t that bizarre to see why Google would act this way when it comes to how their connections to other corporations work. Many sites have come up over the years trying to mimic the world famous online search engine, most notably being Yahoo and Bing. It’s only natural that the company would feel pressure to keep some of the inner workings private so that competitors won’t know how everything works, make their own version, and possibly overshadow Google’s services. It’s just business sense.

Despite that though, Mr. Blum did his best to try and give the reader as much info as he could on the general idea on these data centers, and that combined with his other efforts is ultimately why I ended up really liking this book. Though parts of it could be pretty dry due to how much detail he would cover about the history of these locations, they ultimately served their purpose of showing how the past and the future combine when it comes to the internet, as I mentioned in the previous post.

Questions

• While Google tried to keep some information quiet, Facebook seemed fairly open about their data centers. Could their openness be just for good press, and in reality they’re still hiding some major information from the public?
• Knowing now that the internet cloud doesn’t so much connect us as it “roots us” together, do you think such levels of connection across the world would’ve been possible without the internet, seeing as “rooted” connections is essentially how we connect with others in real life?

Image from: https://despabiladeras85.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/why-people-keep-secrets-then-lie/