https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eea61LpkCdg
The History of the Internet
Sir Tim Berners-Lee worked for the european equivalent to the Manhattan project in the early 1980's. A dozen or so countries were working together to harness the power of the atom. Tim needed a way for all dozen countries to link their computers in their own countries to each other to share information. Since the countries used different operating systems linking them proved to be impossible the way the system was constructed. The United States integrated their military and academic computers in the 1960s in attempt to share information but it was not until Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the hypertext transfer protocol (http) their ideas became a reality.
Personally I never new the existence of the well before watching this documentary but as a kid of america online chat rooms I see the appeal. No surprise that the government made the decision to merge business and the internet in the 1990s when the economy could always go for boom. Napster was my childhood and the amount of time I devoted during the day was a lot more then it is now. My friends would take pride in their libraries and playlist and everyone was their own disk jockey for the cost of a computer and internet connection.
Wikipedia provides a perfect example of how the internet empowers the masses but ultimately a hierarchy makes decisions on what content is deemed acceptable. At first wikipedia was a free flowing ideology where people could edit the information on pages with hopes that the correct information will rise up from the people instead of being forced with information from the powers that be. As you can imagine this led to disagreements by editors who may have disagreed on what content should be included. The site has 12 members at the top who make judgements on what content should be shared to the world. An example of how the even the best pure hearted intentions need to be regulated.
The internet has provided a way for humanity to share a level playing field by providing the same readily available information to the masses. Governments have tried to censor and control the information shared over the internet. The elections in Kenya in 2008 was a prime example. Ushahidi was established to allow citizens to report what they were witnessing first hand in their communities because the government chose not to report what was truly going on with the contested elections. Middle east countries like, Tunisia and Egypt had similar occurrences during the Arab Spring when the people took to twitter, Facebook, youtube, etc to get the massages out of what the regimes were doing to its people.
The internet in its purest for is a way to level humanity and disperse the information to anyone who is looking. Unfortunately, the internet has turned into a business that is being ruled and regulated by those in power and those people in power have the ability to censor and control what is decimated to the public. As seen throughout history there is a group of people who will always check to see if what is being told by the government and news agency to be true but if the truth is hard to find and the information provided is readily available my concern is that people will be lazy and get their information but the easiest most accessible sources instead of trying to dig and find if that in fact is the truth of the report.
