Last year, a guest lecturer in one of my university subjects told me about the day when she first heard about the internet. She remembered being told that it was essentially a whole bunch of invisible ‘stuff’ that we were going to be able to access. Confused, she said, ‘but what is’ it – to her, the idea of something intangible that held such a vast amount of information was unimaginable. She was pleased to hear that it would ‘revolutionise’ the way that she did her job, and figured that it might allow her to search for people’s phone numbers one day, rather than having to flick through a directory.
This bunch of ‘stuff’ that we now know as the Internet, or the ‘World Wide Web’ has grown unimaginably bigger than what most people ever anticipated, and the accessibility to it has only increased this growth. In 2008, there were more ‘things’ on the internet than there were people. In less than 10 years, this has grown exponentially, particularly with the further development of social media, and the younger generations’ involvement with it.
For younger generations, the internet doesn’t seem that hard to grasp – it’s a bunch of ‘things’ that are brought together and stored in one network that we can access if we have hardware which is compatible with it (for example, a computer, smart phone or tablet), but it is always changing. In future generations, the ‘smart phone’ probably won’t include the word ‘smart’ in the title – why would it, if it’s assumed that all phones have basic functionality like access to the internet?
A video from the 1990s, advertising the internet was used by the FineBros YouTube channel on a segment they run called ‘Kids React’. In this video, kids react to a video that explains the benefits of the internet, which to us, seem quite basic. One boy in the original video says, ‘what’s a web page, something ducks walk on?’ demonstrating just how much the internet has become an integrated part of our everyday life.
The internet isn’t just a collection of random things – it’s a collection of ‘things’ that we had before in hard copy that have been made ‘soft’. Take for example, a phone book, a diary, physical books, television, games… the list goes on.
References
WorldWideWebSize, 2014, WorldWideWebSize.com | The size of the World Wide Web (The Internet), (online) Available at: http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ (Accessed 23 October 2014)
TED, 2014, Would you prefer to read from book rather than from online website? | A conversation on TED.com (online) Available at: http://www.ted.com/conversations/18765/would_you_prefer_to_read_from.html (Accessed 23 October 2014)
SAS, 2014, What is the Internet of Things (IoT), (online) Available at: http://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/big-data/internet-of-things.html (Accessed 23 October 2014)
Lauren's Blog 
Watching the original video made me feel so old! Yet we weren’t that young when the rev of the web in homes was first introduced! You do a really nice job on making this topic easy to comprehend and relate it back to something your audience can relate to and associate with. This video is hilarious and reinforces the speed of developing technologies. Great work! If you’re still interested in researching this topic a little more, here’s a great article to read: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-value-of-schmoozing/
The Internet being a collection of things is something I find scary. I instantly feel like it’ll lead to us losing our memory and relying on devices to tell us what’s happened – Something that can be altered. is this a fear anyone else has?
I definitely have the fear of losing my memory! I admire my past ability to remember every single friends home phone number and birthday in high school. Yet now I couldn’t even tell you a mobile number other than my own without looking it up. Once I was a mental arithmetic whiz; I always use a calculator now (the one on my phone of course), because that’s easier than taking half a second to engage my memory. Even with real life events, memories pale in comparison to their beautiful instagram counterparts. I think our reliance on the internet and the devices and tools it gives us are very dangerous and Orwellian- we are shaping our own memories in technicolour instagram filter; a newspeak of the digital age.