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?
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