Email overload, I'm finally picking up threads of conversations from days ago.... In short, although my talk focused largely on issues related to immersive virtual reality, it began by discussing networks, and I did say that I thought it is time to abandon the notion of an "Internet" and think about an "internet." (With due respect for citation, this occurred to me after a lengthy phone conversation with Joe Turow in which he noted that other media are not capitalized.) The former I use to refer to the process, begun in the 1960s with U.S. government funding, of connecting computers and standardizing communication among them. The latter I use to refer to the networking of computers that may or, more importantly, may not rely on that process. In this latter category are included any type of networking project, from home networking to wireless network to cellular networks to Internet2 and so on. In other words, _the Internet_ is an internet (i.e., internetwork) but _the internet_ is a medium akin to other media (e.g., television, radio, etc.). The larger point was that use of the term "network" embedded in these is itself important, whether we are discussing the actual, as in hardware, software, etc., or more importantly when discussing the symbolic, as in the relatively recent popular use of networks as metaphors for everything from stock markets to relationships to biology. That's what made me strongly consider _internet_, for I've been reminded of the ways in which a signal point in the development of media is when we begin to use it symbolically and metaphorically to compare other aspects of life to it. I expect to develop this further when I get to taking the talk and turning it into something publishable at some point, but in relation to the discussion at hand that's what Ulla was referring to, and while it doesn't really sort out the matter of "Internet eras," perhaps it does provide still another way to think about the development of the technology and its uses (symbolic and otherwise). Thanks, Sj At 7:29 PM -0500 11/25/02, Ulla Bunz wrote:

last week at the national communication association Steve Jones was featured in a keynote conversation. He talked about "internet" versus "Internet."

Steve, are you willing to repeat the main thoughts here briefly?

Ulla

...

From: david silver <dsilver@u.washington.edu> Date: 2002/11/25 Mon PM 07:12:30 EST To: air-l@aoir.org Subject: [Air-l] Internet History/Stages, was Internet in Everyday Life

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/

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