Who would’ve thought a global pandemic would shut down my university in the middle of the spring semester? Not I.
Thanks to the Internet, my Digital Media Literacy class is still able to take place. Ironically, our first online lecture covered the rise of the Internet in the mid-to-late 20th century. In this lecture, I gained a deeper insight into the history of the Internet and learned interesting facts about this worldwide network.
I learned about the government’s first prototype of the Internet. During the Cold War, the U.S. Department of Defense began constructing an electronic operating network known as ARPANET. Dr. Patton’s presentation noted that a theory suggests this network was created to ensure the government would be able to send and receive messages if the country was attacked by nuclear weapons. The ARPANET system was the first attempt towards the modern-day Internet.
Dr. Patton’s lecture included statistical information about adult Americans’ internet usage:
- Pew Research Center found that 50% of Americans used the Internet in 2000. In comparison, 90% of Americans used the Internet in 2019.
- The World Wide Web contains almost two billion websites.
- “Roughly 3 in 10 adults with less than a high school education do not use the Internet.”
In my professor’s PowerPoint presentation, she emphasized the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web: “Unlike the Internet’s ‘physical’ network of computers and cables, the Web is a ‘virtual’ space of information.” It never clicked for me before that the Internet and the Web are not one and the same. Now, I understand that users surf the Web for information by accessing the Internet. After class, I researched more information about the Internet and the World Wide Web. Did you know the first website still exists? Visiting this website feels like looking at a time capsule! It’s amazing how far websites have come over the years. I also watched a video created by Code.org featuring Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s founders. In this video, Cerf clears up misconceptions about the Internet, explains its history, and describes how it works.
Also while surfing the Web, I watched the two videos my professor included in her lecture. The first video, “Big Brother is WWWatching You,” delivers a cautionary message about Internet surveillance. This fast-paced rap about the New World Order theory opened my eyes to potential ways my information could be harbored by dark sources. This video’s inclusion of a George Orwell character connected to lecture points made about Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. Forbes contributor Kalev Leetaru discusses Orwell’s predictions about the future in his article “As Orwell’s 1984 Turns 70 It Predicted Much Of Today’s Surveillance Society.” He states,
“Our world goes far beyond the one imagined by Orwell in which every device from our watches to our refrigerators, our thermostats to our toasters, are increasingly Internet-connected and streaming a realtime documentary of our lives back to these private surveillance empires”
(Follow him on Twitter).
The second video, “The 1960s Idea of ‘The Home of 1999’” evaluates a 1967 film’s predictions about the future. It is fascinating how futuristically they envisioned life in 1999. The creators imagined life would resemble The Jetsons in barely over thirty years! The video concludes with an inspiring message: “The world of 1999 and beyond is limited only by the boundaries of our imagination today.” I remember when I was younger, I imagined the year 2020 as a technological utopia complete with friendly robots, flying cars, and time travel.
Watching this video, I realized how dim my visions of the future have become. Over the years, I have reimagined the future as a place where technology brings about our downfall as a species–where people are bound by the internet in a depleted world.
Even though I have the gift of living in a time when humanity’s brightest hopes for technology are being invented, I view technological advancements like the Internet with significant apprehension. “The 1960s Idea” video reminded me to take back control of how I see the future.
I strive to maintain an optimistically woke mindset about the future by embracing the Internet’s and other technology’s benefits, remaining aware of outside influence and surveillance, and making strides toward a brighter technological tomorrow.
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