What is the Internet, Anyway? What Do We Really Know of Its Effects on our Economy, Society and Even our Minds?

Millions of people use the Internet daily, but few realize that in spite of its omnipresence in our lives, our understanding of it – even among experts – is quite hazy.

 Of course, technicians know how individual pieces of hardware and software work, and we all know that that on a simple level the Internet can be accurately defined as a network (or network of networks) shared by a global community of computers. But experts are increasingly admitting that the Internet is interacting with all the structures of our economy and our society in many subtle ways we don’t fully understand.  In an article in the scholarly publication CommLaw Conspectus: The Journal of Communication Law and Policy,<i>  (Spring 2008), philosopher Nicholas J. Slabbert says:  “There is as yet today no coherent and comprehensive philosophical account of the Internet. Philosophers have generally emerged from their studies to observe its existence with wariness and bewilderment.” According to N.J. Slabbert, Internet technology is even breaking down the traditional distinction we make between the sciences and the liberal arts. 

There are several reasons why it is so hard to define the Internet. One reason is the amazing speed with which it has grown. Even the fastest-developing technologies in general public use have in the past developed at rates which made it possible for their progress to be studied and analyzed. However, the first technological steps toward the Internet as we know it today started taking shape in the eighties and began getting widespread public attention only in the nineties, using telecommunications languages designed by a British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee.  By the mid nineties the term Internet, was in general use.  By mid- 2007, the Internet World Statistics database research project estimated that 1.133 billion people were using the Internet.

Another factor, related to speed of development, is the speed with which the Internet is changing. It hasn’t only spread through our society faster than any other recorded technology but has constantly evolved while doing so.

Additionally, the Internet may be unique in the extent to which it has permeated all levels and corners of society virtually at the same time. For example, as far as we can tell, when writing was invented, it was first controlled by priests and other powerful interest groups before it gained use by the general population. Military technology, similarly, has been controlled by military and political leaders. Industrial technology has been limited to special business interests who have preserved it for themselves as long as possible.  It can be argued that the automobile spread throughout developed societies very fast, but even there, not many sections of society, if any, were affected by automobiles as rapidly and as thoroughly as our world today has been transformed by the Internet.

What all the above means in practical terms is that we are piecing together our ideas about the Internet in step by step form, in a process of international dialogue in which everyone can participate – and we are doing so via the Internet itself.  No other technology in history has been the instrument by which over a billion people can participate in discussing, studying and analyzing it.  Every time a user of the Internet distributes a report or opinion on their experience with the Internet, it adds to our information about this extraordinary technology. And how it will develop in future, sociologically, economically, and even technologically, is anyone’s guess.