Notes from: Raine, Lee and Barry Wellman. 2012. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

PART I: THE TRIPLE REVOLUTION

CHAPTER 3 – THE INTERNET REVOLUTION (see also, Chapter 14 from Volti, Rudi. 2014. Society and Technological Change. 7th edition. New York, NY: Worth Publishers.)

Introduction

• The first attempt of transferring information between two wired computers took place in 1969.
• This was rather anticlimactic, as Charley Kline’s computer crashed and needed to be rebooted before the second successful attempt.
• Emailing came into being in 1971 when U.S. Department of Defense contractor Ray Tomlinson sent a meaningless text message from one computer to another just five feet away.
• Tomlinson is not well remembered for those first email text messages, but he is for deciding that “@” should be the locator symbol in electronic addresses.
• From these humble beginnings, the internet-based working of computers has accelerated broader social, economic, and political forces that were already driving networked individualism.
• The internet has empowered people and has extended their reach to and understanding of large, dispersed social networks.
• The internet has given rise to an awareness of being in social networks and at the same time altered our conception of what it means to be networked.
• A select few, such as innovators of military technologies and technology firms, had the online world to themselves for two decades—from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.
• According to the1983 “Road after 1984: The Impact of Technology on Society” telephone survey, approximately 1.4% American computer owners used their computers to transmit or receive information to or from other computers over telephone lines.
• Tim Berners-Lee introduced his hypertext transfer protocol (http) code in 1989 and the hypertext markup language (HTML) required to write it in 1990. Not patenting this invention allowed open public use of his “World Wide Web” by 1991.
• In the early 1990s, when internet browsers were launched, only those with very specialized knowledge—around 15 million people—could navigate the internet.
• Marc Andreessen and Erica Bina unveiled Mosaic 1.0 in 1993, and with the introduction of Netscape Navigator, the World Wide Web became a dominant part of internet traffic.
• The new graphical format indoctrinated “late majority” Americans into the Internet Age, ushering a new era and social operating system.

Notes from: Technology (Chapter 3): Van Dijk. 2012. The Network Society, 3rd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Why Was Internet Adoption So Rapid and Widespread?

• Eight factors that encourage the embrace of the internet:
• First—the U.S. government took a hands-off policy role in regulating internet, allowing it to flourish as an “information” service rather than a “telecommunications” service.
• Second—this hands-off policy approach made innovating and producing internet and semiconductor technologies (see Moore’s Law) attractive to hardware and software makers. As such, internet technologies advanced rapidly and dramatically.
• Third—the advent of broadband and then Ethernet technologies made it possible to push bits of data more and more quickly and efficiently, from around 300 bits per second in the mid-1970s to around one billion in 2011, and at progressively lower costs.
• Fourth—as wireless technologies advanced, the data transfer spectrum broadened.
• Fifth—the internet remained a network of networks with consistent domain names (i.e., the top-level domains, such as “com”, “net”, and “org”, being the most prevalent) and interconnected internet service providers (ISPs).
• Sixth—until recently, ISPs provided bandwidth at a flat rate. Regardless of how many bits consumers uploaded or downloaded, they were permitted to do so for a fixed price. This has changed, however, with tiered costs and “data caps”.
• Seventh—storage capabilities have advanced exponentially. Just as Moore’s law predicted how micro-processing power and semiconductor technology would advance, Mark Kryder developed another law of technology that predicted how storage capabilities would double.
• Eighth—compelling applications (apps), such as email, have led people to increasingly embrace the internet since the 1990s.

The Personal and Connected Computer Supports Networked Individualism

• Several features of the personal computer and the internet can be viewed as affordances—“the possible actions a person can perform on an object”—of their technologies.
• Computer and internet technologies do not solely determine social behavior (see technological determinism). Rather, people use computer and internet technologies in a variety of ways, even in ways not imagined in the technologies’ original designs.
• They are able to do this because computers are personal, interconnected, and have helped more than intimidated people; computers and the internet have become humanized; communication can be more customized and private on the internet and with mobile technologies; and the internet is individualized and open to individual choice, making it an asynchronous system by eliminating the restraints of time and place.

The Internet Expands: An Early Adopter’s Tale

• Search engines such as AltaVista (1995) and Google (1998) compelled increasingly greater proportions of “late majority” American users to adopt internet technologies.
• As the “online” experience became more diverse, offering services such as competitive and convenient shopping, customizable information searching, online gaming and pornography, and peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, new user numbers grew and existing users became more and more immersed into the experience.
• The growing usefulness of the internet cultivated what some might call a “network effect”, increasing the perceived value of users’ stakes in being online.
• In short, “The internet allowed users to be both more networked and to be more assertive in their individualism” (70).
• The authors of the text refer to this as a “virtuous circle” between supply-side creation and demand-side participation.

A Pilgrim’s Progress Continues as Broadband Brings in the Early and Late Majorities

• The influence that broadband had on bringing in the early and late majorities was phenomenal. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, between 2000 and 2013, the percentage of American adult broadband users increased from 3% to a whopping 70%!
• The conversion from dial-up to broadband also brought about greater satisfaction with the networked environment. Between 2000 and 2011, the percentage of Americans who used the internet on a typical day more than doubled, mushrooming from 29% to a mammoth 60%! (see social media use)
• The Web at 25: Part 1--How the Internet has Woven Itself into American Life, Pew Research Center, February 27, 2014.

The State of Digital Divides

• There is another side to this story of burgeoning internet use. Pew Internet’s 2011 survey revealed various figures that show not everyone has adopted or has been able to adopt internet technologies into their lives:
• 22% of adults do not use the internet
• 39% do not use high-speed connections at home (2013)
• 41% do not use mobile connections
• 17% of adults and 25% of teenagers do not have mobile phones
• The explanations for these variances range from age to socioeconomic factors such as educational attainment and household income.
• “Digital differences” are evident in every demographic subgroup. Women are more likely than men to use highly social online activities such as email or social networking sites; older users are more likely than younger users to receive news, health, and government information; and African American and Latino users are more likely than white users to use nonvoice services such as texting and video sharing, listening to music, and playing games.
• Since there is no centralized control, the Internet is somewhat democratic--yet, the inequalities that persist in so many aspects of social life are reflected in online access within and between countries.
  • 2011: 78.6% of North Americans were Internet users, 13.5% of Africans (up to 15.6% in 2012). 2010: 95.6% of Iceland's population and 1.3% of Cambodia's.
• Developed versus developing nations.
• USA (2013): public access versus access at home. Data from 2010:
  • 71% have connection. Income: 93% over $100,000 versus 43% under $25,000.
  • 72% of white households versus 65% of African American and 67% Hispanic households. If smartphone access is included (slide 7), numbers improve, especially for African Americans and Hispanics (still, smartphone access is limited: "walled garden" and ease of use).
  • 70% urban versus 57% rural.
  • 49% with disabilities versus 69% all adults have broadband at home (slide 9).
  • 86% of all adults versus 59% of those 65 and older go online. 70% of all have broadband versus 47% of elderly.
• These digital differences represent a “digital skills” gap among demographic subgroups. A number of users lack what some might call “internet literacy” and “net smarts”.
• Income and education levels are associated with internet skills, and variations in skills result in an inability to use the internet effectively, which worsens social inequalities—the new “digital divide”.
• Who is Not Online (2013) and who is.

The Culture of the Internet

• According to Manuel Castells, four distinct internet cultures have largely shaped the ethos of the online world have influenced how the internet has afforded networked individualism.
• First, techno-elites, the first and best in the business, have instilled the ethic of open development of science and technology into the internet’s procedures.
• Second, hackers, embrace freedoms of creation, contributing to upgrading the internet through work not tied to corporate or institutional assignments.
• Third, virtual communitarians, rooted in the San Francisco Bay counterculture, have shaped the internet’s social and communication processes.
• Fourth, entrepreneurs, working from their “Silicon Valley”, value profit, and have been largely responsible for diffusing the internet into society at large.
• Another culture not included in Castells’ typology is comprised of participators. They are bloggers and social network devotees; they are the users who source, create, and share a substantial amount of material on the internet.
• Working from the French typology of Estates, William Dutton has called for the recognition that active participators constitute a Fifth Estate.

 The Evolution of Networking

• The internet revolution contributed greatly to the societal trend toward the new networked operating system, and this trend was pushed even further by the coming together of internet revolution and the mobile revolution.

Chapter 3: Technology from, Van Dijk. 2012. The Network Society, 3rd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications

Chapter 14 from Volti, Rudi. 2014. Society and Technological Change. 7th edition. New York, NY: Worth Publishers.

Chapter 4: The Mobile Revolution

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