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Media Platforms and Industries 2 Lecture Notes
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Lecture notes of 30 pages for the course Media Platforms and Industries 2 at RuG (-)
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Media Platforms and IndustriesBy Robert Prey
College 1: The Internet
It’s very interesting to look at these old clips of people talking about the internet, and it gives
you a good vibe of how revolutionary it was at the time. This video was in 1994. In 1994 and
on mainstream television shows, people where rappelling with what is this new medium?
What is this internet thing? What is email? How do we use it and what do we use it for?
The origins of the internet
This starts with the Cold war. In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 1 into space.
This was a huge thing for the entire world. As a reaction to this the US founded the
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958. This was a special agency underneath
the department of defense. The mission of ARPA was to develop long-term highly innovative
and hazardous research projects. One of their first missions was to develop a
telecommunications network that could survive large scale disruption. What did large scale
disruption mean in 1958? This meant a nuclear war. the thought was that a nuclear attack
from the Soviet Union was imminent, at any moment or at any war a war could start. So,
what ARPA and the US defense department, what they decided that they needed to create,
was a distributed network. Previous to this telephone networks were a good example of
centralized networks. If something happened to the central server in that network, the
entire network went out. A distributed network has no hierarchies and no predetermined
grounds between the individual parts. The communication can flow through different
channels. This was their first mission because of the fear of nuclear bombing. When the
networks were centralized and one place would be bombed, then the entire network would
be out. Therefore, the US created a distributed network or a decentralized network instead
of centralized network.
What was also developed at this time was a new technology called packet switching. This
involves breaking data down into small packages, so they can be transmitted effectively or
efficiently across the network. Think about a note send across the classroom, you can send
the entire note through the classroom to the receiver, but the chance that somebody else
would read it would be there. So, you can rip the note apart and send it in parts. Eventually
when it gets back to the receiver, he or she can put it back in the order that it was supposed
to.
,So, the origins of the internet are in the cold war, specifically in the US defense department.
Most of the technologies that have been developed, a lot of their technologies are
developed initially by the states departments and particularly the defense department.
Before the internet there was ARPA-net. In 1969 the UCLA (University of California and Los
Angeles), Stanford research institute, UCSB (University of California and Santa Barbara) and
university of Utah were connected by a network of computers. This was the first network,
the ARPA net. In 1973 ARPA-net went international. A satellite link connected places like
Norway and London. So, at this point this network, ARPA net, had around 40 notes. By 1982
the ARPA-net grew to around a hundred notes around the world. This is not much, but it was
enough to support a vibrant online community. So long before facebook and twitter, ARPA
net allowed mainly (computer) scientists who had access to the network, to stay in touch
with each other.
There was a new bulletin board system that was created in 1980, called Use-net. It caught on
bigly. It was organized by topic. It allowed users to swap everything from programming tips
to opinions on issues, jokes, recipes etc. so you can see very early on, before the internet
went mainstream, there was already a (small) thriving community using the early internet.
By 1993 the internet was still dominated by the US, but it was getting more global. Most of
the communication then took place in North America, but you could already see trans
Atlantic and trans pacific connections.
We often forget that around this time, the early 1990’s, the internet was just one network or
network system among many others. There were other experiments going around the world
and trying to do the same thing. For example, the French had the Minitel. This is the French
online service accessible through telephone lines from early 1980’s till 2012. It was one of
the world’s most successful pre-www online services (this was before the web). People on
the Minitel used Minitel for the same things as we use the internet for. Pornographic photos,
buying train tickets, search the telephone book, mailbox, people even used it to access
pornographic photos etc. So, it was not really that different. But Minitel did not survive, it
was gradually overshadowed by the world wide web.
, The word wide web was first introduced by the English scientist Tim Berners Lee in 1989. He
wrote the first web broser working. The web was really important because it really
determined the success of the internet. It made the internet a mainstream system. While
the web determined the success of the internet, it was with the introduction of the Mosaic
web browser in 1993 that the web and thus the internet went mainstream. This is because
prior to Mosaic most web browsers were non-graphical. They did not have graphics, they
were mainly text based. Mosaic on the other hand was a graphical browser, it was the first
browser that could display images in line with text instead of playing images in separate
windows. So this really helped to make the internet go mainstream, it was easier to use, it
was more appealing to people.
If you think about the contemporary browsers that you use (Crhome, FireFox, etc) all of
these browsers are kind of the descendants of these early browsers like mosaic. It
introduced many of the features that we are used to, such as the URL bar, the reload buttons
and so forth.
While the internet was first established by government institutions it started to be privatized
in the late 1990’s. The privatization of the internet transformed what had initially been an
obscure academic network into a hot bed of commercial innovation. So, in the 1990’s
hundreds of different companies scrambled up trying to take advantage of the perceived
opportunities that this new tool for communication was allowing. This is a little bit like radio.
Around this time all of these new companies started to take over and develop new business
plans. There was a lot of hype and excitement around it. what happens often is that a kind of
bubble develops. So, when the bubble bursts, as it usually does, many of these companies
disappear.
The dotcom bubbles an economic bubble that occurred roughly from 1997 till 2001. This
was a period of extreme growth in the usage, adaption of the internet by businesses and
consumers.
The term Irrational exuberance is often used to describe a bubble starts to form. People
start to drive asset up, because they are starting to get real excited about some new asset
and they drive it up to levels that are not supported by the fundamental levels.
Unsustainable investor enthusiasm that drives the levels of the asset up to levels that are
not supported by economic fundamentals.
Everybody thought that all they had to do is start an internet company and the money would
just start to roll in. And it did for a while, if you had a .com behind the name of your
company you would attract a lot of money from potential investors. This went well for a
couple of years until these investors realized that these companies were not actually making
any money and they did not have a solid business plan. So, they basically got ahead of
themselves. What happened is that the economy collapsed, and it disappeared for a while.
That does not mean that something productive was not great. Because of all this money that
was surrounding the internet for a while, a lot of infrastructure was created. A lot of
infrastructure that would then fuel the more logical development of the internet years later
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