RISE OF THE INTERNET:

I always start this course discussing how the Internet came to be, because I think it is vital to understanding concepts we’ll revisit later, especially around business, labor, surveillance, etc. So, how did the Internet begin?

1960s: The US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency used taxpayer dollars to create and fund a network that would allow military personnel and academic researchers collaborating on military projects to share information with each other across distances instantaneously. The resulting program was called ARPAnet, and it was a wired network system where users in locations that were connected to the wired network could log into a computer, and the computer would use binary code to make files smaller.

Want to learn more about binary code? You can check out this video.

1970s: Email was created in the early 1970s, and was created for users of ARPAnet. Here’s a video about who and how it was created (spoiler alert: it was just a regular guy who worked on ARPAnet and he created it in spare time, as you do, I guess):

1980s: After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the military stopped funding a number of different studies and programs, and therefore they no longer needed ARPAnet. The government decided to open up the program for commercial development, meaning that they made the decision to allow corporations to continue to develop the program on their own, without needing to make it a public utility.

1990s: Tim Berners-Lee developed the language of the World Wide Web and HTML, which means he created a language all computers could read regardless of their operating systems. This is why a website looks the same on a Mac and a Dell, and looks the same whether you’re operating Windows, an old IOS, or any other software. It was a pretty big deal. Tim Berners-Lee thought computer and internet access should be freely available as a public utility, so he made his work freely available to anyone who wanted to use it.

BIG TAKEAWAYS: The foundations of the modern Internet were developed largely by public tax dollars: public programmers working for the government who wanted these programs to continue to be freely available to the public.

But, of course, the early influencers for public adoption were mostly corporations, and the biggest was AOL. Many of you are probably too young to remember AOL, but here’s a video for you to watch and laugh about. It shows how these early companies attempted to explain what the Internet could do for people, which is interesting to imagine in today’s world where we use it for nearly everything we do. It also shows that to access the Internet, you got a CD in the mail that you put into your computer, and it would help you use a landline to connect to the Internet. Most CDs were good for about 10 hours of access (like, 10 total hours) and then you needed a new disc. (Insert “Back when I was a kid” eyerolls here.)

POWER

It is also important to think about the way that social media encourages us to think about power relationships. We tend to think of the Internet as totally lifechanging and unprecedented, and in some ways it is. But it is also important to think about the ways similar societal shifts happened with other forms of technology.

VERTICAL MODEL: If you think back to societal structures from before the printing press, for example, most societies were top-down power models. This means that most societies operated with one person or group of people who were in charge, and the rest of people took information and orders from the people in charge.

• EXAMPLE: READING and INTERPRETATION
  Before the printing press, very few people could read, and even those who could read very rarely had access to books. That makes sense, because all books had to be written out by hand, which was very expensive and time-consuming. So, if you were Christian and went to your church, the leaders of that church would read the bible and interpret it for you. You would likely believe their interpretation, because you had no other way of knowing if it was correct or not. You probably couldn’t read, and even if you could, you probably did not have your own copy of the Bible.This is a vertical power model, because there are very few people at the top with access to information and resources you need. Very few people can write. Very few people can read. That means very few people can interpret what something means. So if you are a regular person, you lack the power resources to lead.

HORIZONTAL MODEL: New technologies changed this model to a more horizontal model, where power is more equally shared among people and leaders.

• EXAMPLE: THE PRINTING PRESS
  So, as the story above goes, very few people could afford to pay scribes to write out books for them. But then ::dun dun dun:: the printing press was invented. This enabled the Bible, in particular, to be mass produced and widely available for a relatively low cost. Many people started reading the Bible, and all the of the sudden, we started getting quite a few different interpretations of this text. Different people took different meanings from the same passages. So, it led to a real change in the church, where the pastors could offer interpretations but parishioners also had the power to make their own interpretations. This created radical shifts in the hierarchies of the church (and of the government’s relationship with the church as a form of power).
• EXAMPLE: SOCIAL MEDIA
  Before social media, traditional news outlets such as daily newspapers would decide which stories were worthwhile, and they would then have reporters gather information about and publish those stories. With the rise of social media, people have greater access to share information, and this shared information is increasingly the subject of major news stories.

For one famous example, major news outlets did not publish stories about Trayvon Martin’s murder until after a Change.org petition went viral. After that, enormous social media pressure to press charges against George Zimmerman led to news outlets starting to cover the story, which of course then became headline news.

CONVERGENCE

Social media also enables and is enabled by convergence. Convergence is the idea that different types of media come together within a single piece of media or technology. There are three main types that scholars discuss:

• Technological convergence: This is the joining of multiple media technologies in one device, such as the cell phone question you just answered. Now, instead of carrying a flashlight, calendar, book, music playing device, computer, television, shopping network, etc., we just carry our cell phones and it does all this for us.
• Economic convergence: This is the joining together of multiple corporate media technologies who converge and engage in vertical integration. That means, larger companies buy out their competitors, with the goal of controlling the process of production, distribution, and reception. We will cover vertical integration later in the text, but here is a link to a basic primer on vertical integration.
• Social convergence: Using multiple media simultaneously. This is also often called the third screen or fourth screen effect, highlighting that many of us will watch TV while also using our cell phones and perhaps computers at the same time. We are used to having multiple devices pulling at our attention all the time.

TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM:

This is the idea that technology itself dictates the process of social change. In order words, the idea of technological determinism says that certain technologies (like the cell phone) come into our lives, and that there is something inherent in the technology that fundamentally changes our society in a predictable traceable path. Technological determinism says the effects the technology has on our society are inherent in the technology, rather than socially conditioned or produced.

Main ideas:

• Once an influential technology is introduced, the world will never be the same.
• We have no choice but to adopt certain technologies.
• Technologies create new potential and possibility for human activities and thought. They radically affect how we think, feel, and act.

Check out this video, where I explain some ideas of technological determinism using examples.

TECHNOCULTURAL APPROACH:

This theory says that yes, technologies are important, BUT how we use them is just as important, if not more important. This theory states that yes, technology does make certain new ways of interacting possible, but says that what is more important is whether these ideas fit with our social norms. For example, everyone thought video calling would completely replace audio-only calls. And yes, we do use video calls on a regular basis to connect with each other. But, we still make audio-only calls regularly. For example, I am using an audio-only recording because my hair looks terrible and I’m in sweatpants right now, which doesn’t mesh well with the social norm that your professor look like they have their shit together. J

Check out this video for more explanation on the technocultural approach: