Hi Folks, i just returned after giving a class lecture which featured an abbreviated history of the internet and found barry's post quite interesting. besides information about his and caroline haythornthwaite's book, he included the following excerpt from the introduction: *** Excerpts from the Editors' Introduction, Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornthwaite: _The Internet in Everyday Life_ is about the second age of the Internet as it descends from the firmament and becomes embedded in everyday life. The first age of the Internet was a bright light shining above everyday concerns. In the euphoria, many analysts lost their perspective. The rapid contraction of the dot.com economy has brought down to earth the once-euphoric belief in the infinite possibility of Internet life. *** i'm curious about this notion of two stages of the internet. if i'm reading the paragraph correctly, the authors suggest the net has had two stages: before and after the dot.com crash. i'm interested in hearing what others think about this concept of a two-staged internet history. in my own lecture this morning, i tracked a number of stages, all of which contain, i believe, significant differences between them. for example (and this is the abridged version): 1960s/early 1970s - ARPANET 1975 - a more social internet with lists like SF-Lovers 1979 - a more public internet (here i'm defining the internet more expansively) with the introduction of usenet groups late 1980s/early 1990s - mass influx of users via prodigy/compuserve/aol 1991 - a more distributive (and later graphical) turn with berners-lee's world wide web, followed by mosaic (1993), and netscape (1994) 1995 - netscape goes public, wall street goes crazy, dot.com daze begins etc etc etc. (like all historical stages, these are complex and reflect an interesting intersection among social and cultural contexts, technological developments, economic conditions, etc.) thoughts? david silver http://faculty.washington.edu/dsilver/