Embedded Files
January 31st, 2025
From its inception, the internet has become an entity that has grown a life of its own, seemingly untethered by the physical world. It is undoubtedly a technical marvel which has had one of the largest impacts on humanity, namely because we have seen nothing like it ever before. In post-Covid times, a fear of its powers and capabilities has grown exponentially. A.I, fake news, and social media shut-downs alone have many fearing the World Wide Web. The question has now become, are we the masters of our technology, or have we become subservient? What is forgotten in this mess is that to critique something, we have to do so from a point of knowledge. Ignorance is bliss, but there is great danger in it. Marie Curie said “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” In our contemporary times, this is undeniably valuable information.
To understand how we got to this point, we have to begin at the birth of the internet.
In Ben Tarnoff’s 2016 article for The Guardian, titled: How the internet was invented this was the very goal, not to vilify, but to explore the internet’s origins and evolution. It all began in the late 1960s with ARPANET, a project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. The original goal of ARPANET was to provide researchers with a tool to share computer resources over long distances–this laid the groundwork for what would eventually become the internet. TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) was foundational in the creation of unified computer networks, created by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, these protocols act as the messengers of packets (byte-sized pieces of information sent from computer to computer) and are still used today. It did not take long for the ARPANET to change, and it did not remain localized to research and academia for long. In the 1990s the Internet as we have come to see it was made, through its privatization and commercialization, it rapidly expanded into popular culture as the public was given access to it.
“The internet would end up being useful to the US military, if not quite in the ways its architects intended. But it didn’t really take off until it became civilianized and commercialized – a phenomenon that the Arpa researchers of the 1970s could never have anticipated.” (Tarnoff 2016)
As the article continues, Tarnoff highlights the collaborative and transformative impact which the internet has had on society, it is in his words a “boundless, borderless, digital universe” and he isn’t wrong. Almost 50 years since the Internet was born, and nearly a decade after Ben Tarnoff’s article on its invention, we are still working to understand this virtual beast. Tarnoff’s article shows an intentional step we all need to take to further our knowledge of the technologies which have become entangled in our everyday lives. His writing employs fairly accessible language and uses similes and metaphors to help the reader understand this complex technology without the need for a degree in computer science. Examples of this are shown when he says: “The internet is like the holy ghost: it makes itself knowable to us by taking possession of the pixels on our screens to manifest sites and apps and email, but its essence is always elsewhere.” (Tarnoff 2016) Which helps to visualize the presence of this information superhighway, away from ‘tech jargon’.
Moving back to the aforementioned quote from Marie Curie, as we continue to think about digital literacy, it is imperative we understand the history and origins of cyberspace. If we do not, can we give any credibility to our own fears, and trepidations on the future of the electronic world? While the knowledge of its rapid growth may spike fear, having a firm foundation in its history undeniably helps us to see that it is a human made being, and if we know that, then we can remain in control.
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