The thrill of a lifetime only two decades ago, the Internet has since become more like a staid utility than an adventure. It's become like electricity or sewage--something we're intimately dependent on but don't pay much heed to nowadays. We just use it.
And we have grown increasingly dependent. If you don't believe this, consider Estonia, which in 2007--as a country--was brought to its knees for two weeks by a sustained attack on its network infrastructure. Or consider Expedia--the way you actually book flights today. Or eMusic, the way you shop for music. Or Skype, the way you talk with relatives in Australia. Or Google, the way you find things. Or Amazon, the way you buy books and a host of other stuff. Or, or, or, or.
I know that I, for one, could not do my job without the Internet. Not even close. It has become one of the large cogs in the machinery of society. Remove it today and you will probably see instant collapse of large portions of not only the economy but of the day-to-day world of the citizenry. Digital indeed.
But as with plumbing, which we now take for granted--much as we take trees for granted--we don't give the Internet much thought nowadays. It's there (and for many young people, has always been there) and always will be. You open the tap: there's water; you power up your PC: there's the Internet.
Still, when it comes to knowing what we're dealing with here, we've stopped reflecting. Not due to lack of information, quite the contrary, we're drowning in the stuff. When it comes to the Internet, we find ourselves in what Manuel Castell so aptly calls "informed bewilderment."
A recent John Naughton Guardian/Observer article--which you can find here sheds some much needed light on the Internet and how we should (or can) relate to it. I strongly recommend you read it, but I'll mention some of the points.
The Long View
When it comes to estimating the current or long-term impact of the Internet on our society as a whole, we'll just have to wait and see. It was not really clear what impact the printing press would have on the world until centuries after its invention--hindsight being a great thing.
The Internet is changing the way we do things, and drastically, but where is it all heading: while we can guess, and educatedly so, we just don't know.
Tracks vs. Trains
In most minds over the last several years, the Internet and the World Wide Web have grown increasingly synonymous. Still, they are not the same, not at all.
See the Internet as a railway, tracks, infrastructure, switching posts, stations, ticket sales; the WWW is just one type of train, just one portion of the traffic that runs on it.
And just like the railways tracks don't care what kind of trains they carry, neither does the Internet care what type of information packages are sent and (at the speed of light, literally) delivered: whether email, army intelligence, music, Google answers, GPS information, stock quotes, surveillance video or, indeed, the World Wide Web.
The Net Computer
One well-educated guess where the Internet is heading is that it will eventually become the computer we all use.
In the 1960s and 1970s we talked about centralized processing, the IBM mainframes serving bunch of "dumb" terminals. This changed in the 1980s and 1990s to distributed processing, intelligent terminals that did some, or most, of the processing themselves.
Now--with increasingly higher bandwidth connections to the Internet--the path seems headed for a return to "centralized" processing--or, rather, to a marriage of the centralized and the distributed models--where the Internet will do most of not only the crunching, but the storage, correlation, intelligence, and distribution of what we want the computer to do.
Many back up their computers to Internet servers that are so secure that one wonders why even bother with local (on your own PC) copies.
The Long View: Redux
These and other considerations are touched upon by John Naughton in his analysis of where this is all heading. Still, and rightly so, he ends with the only possible conclusion: "It's too early to say."
Read the article.
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