Evolution of the Internet: Technologies, Applications, Issues

internet history

Technologies and Applications

The following sections group internet (mostly web-oriented) technologies and applications (some highlighted in History), with more detail about what they are and how they work -- from smaller to larger building blocks, from simpler to more complex layers.

Technology areas include: network connections, device and resource addresses; internet protocols, standards, tools and frameworks, content access, search, and security. Application areas include: crowd sourcing and cloud apps, learning, health, communication, social networking, media and entertainment, electronic commerce, and, of course, the future.

  • "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur Clarke's 3rd 'law'

  • "The general precept of any product is that simple things should be easy, and hard things should be possible." ~Alan Kay

  • "We are the brothers and sisters of our machines. Minds and tools have been sharpened against each other ever since a scavenger's stone fractured cleanly and the first cutting edge was held in a hunter's hand." ~George Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines

  • "Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences." ~Freeman Dyson

utopia

Issues

Within these technology and application categories, there are also many consequences of Internet use -- many good, some not so much -- for individuals and society. We'll survey and describe topics such as digital divide, network neutrality, malware, cybercrime, cyberwar, censorship, anonymity, decency, privacy, and online behavior.

  • "Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road." ~Stewart Brand

  • addiction"For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three." ~Alice Kahn

  • "It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." ~Albert Einstein

  • "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." ~Albert Einstein

  • "To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." ~Paul Ehrlich

  • privacy"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger." ~Frank Lloyd Wright

  • "Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards." ~Aldous Huxley

  • "Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other." ~C.P. Snow, New York Times, 15 March 1971

  • "The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology." ~E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 1973

  • "Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it." ~Max Frisch

  • "Men have become the tools of their tools." ~Henry David Thoreau

  • "A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila." ~Mitch Radcliffe

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