Inside The Internet's History and Cyber Identities

This blog post is in response to the O'Regan article The Internet Revolution as well as Bell's article Identities In Cyberculture. Obviously, these articles have very little to do with each other, but they proved to be fascinating reads nonetheless.

Most of Regan's article I was already familiar with from doing background research for my groups presentation on the history of the internet tomorrow (as well as a lecture from my Digital Journalism class) but I enjoyed reading it anyway.

However, one thing this article mentioned was that the development of the internet could be traced all the way back to the 1940s when scientist Vanevar Bush began work on an automated network to solve differential equations for the Us Navy. This is an intriguing development, but it seems like something that isn't quite relevant enough to be included in our presentation. The 1960s DARPA/ARPANET era turned up several times in our research but this is the first I've read the name Vanevar Bush in reading about the development of the internet.

Other than that, this piece really laid out a nice timeline of the history of the internet in a way that mirrors it's developments as I remember reading and hearing about them in various news media when they happened. It was really relevant to me and I liked that.

Bell's piece was also intriguing in its own way. However, I think it would've made a better supplemental read to the previous week when we were learning of the concept of the panopticon. I say this because Bell's reading dealt mostly with identities people assume online and it reminded me of my comments during the panopticon lecture (as well as from last week's blog entry) about how each of us constructs our own panopticon online in that we each allow all of humanity a certain amount of surveillance in our lives and they in turn can comment on what we are doing. This could influence people to alter how they present themselves online as well.

Rather than raising an entirely new point form this week's readings, I would like to direct your attention to another reading from my Digital Journalism class that I think you might find to be quite interesting. This is a piece written by Robert Capps or Wired magazine. It was published about two and a half years ago and is entitled The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine. It is about how we as Americans have been slowly sacrificing quality and clarity in our digital media for cheap convenience. As long as we can take pictures, listen to music and upload video to the internet in real time, the low quality and relative simplicity of it all is merely "good enough" for us. I highly recommend reading this.

Well, since I have nothing else this week, I will simply conclude by saying that I hope you enjoy my presentation tomorrow...or hope you did previously enjoy it...just regardless of when you happen to be reading this I hope you thought my presentation was great!