Alex Lederer, Assignment 1
The “History of the Internet” was something I know, but still the medium and message sent across still resonate with me for a variety of reasons. The way in which it is presented has become such a common way to teach on the internet, with the snappy background music and use of visual aids. It was very reminiscent of Michael Wesch’s “Web 2.0, The Machine is Us/ing Us,” and as I re-watch that video it is just as technical.
I don’t know why exactly this medium is so interesting for teaching, and I’m pretty surprised both have a fair number of views, so there is some novelty that this video medium provides that is conductive to education and also entertainment.
The thing that interested me most about the video was the fact that I never realized how lucky we were that the phone companies decided to use their servers to give universal access through the same servers. It’s interesting to think that the internet might not have become commercial or as wide spread without the phone companies to step in first to stop all these different networks from being incompatible. The internet, even with the Arab Spring and descent groups meeting over the internet in China, is still a very western product that caters to the minds and needs of people in western cultures, especially since the creation of web 2.0. It is not yet a truly universal system, and this is in part due to the origins and user base of the internet. It could have been a very real possibility that different servers would only link inside their own countries or cultures, and the WWW as we know it today would have never existed.
My potential historical topics I plan to research this semester are-
1. Digital Anthropology and looking for web based communities or “tribes”
2. Early hacker culture in the 90s.
3. How communications have changed through new technologies (mediated)
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