Internet

The Internet is among the rare group of entities—whether inventions, ideas, or cultural phenomena more broadly—that began as a development within the U.S. Department of Defense and later came to be one of the most impactful social forces in a way unimagined by the initial developers, researchers, and scientists. The Internet, and later the World Wide Web, has to this day made a lasting impression globally. First conceived of as a last-ditch means of communication within the military in case the normal means of doing so were damaged by nuclear attack, the Internet was, in some ways, the bomb shelter of the realm of telecommunications. Later, when universities revitalized it as a means of sharing research, it took on the general “shape,” if you will, of what we today recognize as the Internet.

Today, the Internet is a media technology consisting of a global network of computers and other devices that allow for the relatively quick and easy transmission of data built on layers of protocols. It is this that has allowed for a variety of uses, including commerce, communication, data storage, and research. To put it in terms media theorist Marshall McLuhan once used, the Internet is the medium that contains all other media as its content. In other words, the Internet stands as the metamedia of the twenty-first century. For this reason, the Internet has since the 1990s been considered an important area of research by sociologists, anthropologists, communications scholars, and economists. More than twenty years after the Internet arrived on the consumer market, it is seen as an integral part of social research on identity, social interaction, culture, politics and consumption and has been a fruitful area of research in the humanities as well.