“The internet is the largest engineering project the earth has ever seen”
Is the internet just the connection between servers? Or is it the people that go onto the different websites and build communities and make the connections work? Moving from the simple military-use internet, to the WWW by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, to the more modern internet we had a decade ago and now Web 3.0 shows how different eras of technology require different solutions. In the early stages of the internet, the use was primarily a modern way of transmitting sensitive information that would be harder to intercept. People at that time primarily used radio signals to transmit data. In the early stages of the WWW, people used the internet as a plain canvas to send and receive basic information, later images and building specialized spaces. When people started thinking of ways to share more information, Web 2.0 was introduced to allow for sharing large files, file downloads, complex advertising & analytics, etc. Nowadays, Web 3.0 allows for a more AI or machine-learning approach to the web. Websites now learn what the user wants and provides a much easier way of browsing the web, looking things up, and even doing work online.
The premise of the internet was to create a culturally neutral space for people from all over the world. What happens when you have everyone working together to make something work? The internet has formed some sort of culture that is beyond cultural differences and against nationalization. People gather to discuss something or consume a piece of media they all agree upon. That doesn’t mean that people do not fight over ideas, this also it doesn’t mean that people all agree upon the same ideas, yet they all agree to use one thing to make their discussion work, that’s the internet. In platforms, people do not care as to what was the origin of this website or where the owners are from, many platforms ascended the nationalization level into the global era.
But what happened in actuality is that the US control the internet. Take what happened with Russian websites and businesses for example. Although many of the Russians might oppose Putin’s agenda, yet all their businesses were not allowed to operate normally. Many of the websites were even shut down. Websites that had a Russian agenda were shut down. So, is the internet really for everyone? If I have the domain of my own, does that guarantee that no one is going to shut down my website? Am I really allowed to say whatever I believe? Or does what I say need to align with the global western agenda to be considered “free speech”, so that I could keep my website or business afloat.
Crew,Bec. n.d. “A Map of The Entire Internet in 1973 Has Been Found in Some Old University Papers.” Science Alert. Accessed April 12, 2022. https://www.sciencealert.com/old-nasa-papers-have-revealed-a-map-of-the-entire-internet-from-1973.
“How Do Computers Work? A Simple Introduction.” 2007. Explain That Stuff. May 11, 2007. http://www.explainthatstuff.com/howcomputerswork.html.
“THE INTERNET.” n.d. Opte. Accessed April 12, 2022. https://www.opte.org/the-internet.
“What Is Web 2.0.” n.d. Accessed April 12, 2022. https://oreilly.com.
