The History of the Internet: Collaboration, Commerce, and Polarization

The Information Superhighway, the ‘net or the World Wide Web: Each of its names depict a massive potential of impact on humanity. A huge compilation of stories, conversations and cute animals. And hate speech, false narratives. Let’s not forget versions of reality created for politics, and neon, glittery stuff everywhere.

The Internet is part of our lives, every single day. It’s changing; and very much like how we can’t sense how our face subtly changes over the years, we can’t feel the change as it happens.

Let’s talk about the future of the Internet, reviewing the key occurrences that led to the Internet as we experience it today. Maybe afterwards, in time, we can plan how we may start thinking about the kind of Internet we want to create.

Deliberate organization of information

Jerry Yang and David Filo, two engineering students, founded Yahoo. This was a critical moment in time, where a profit-oriented player entered the game to organize the information on the Internet. Their method was to categorize websites into groups expressing the topics they touch upon, such as politics, games or movies. If you love movies, there are tens of pages, interesting stuff to entertain yourself with.

A marvelous thing!

What the Internet enabled us to do

The most recent advancements in data science, artificial intelligence, augmented reality usually first translate into cool experiments online. As we wander the Internet’s most popular squares and peek through its alleys, further marvels cross our way.

The vast amount of options leave us amazed and oftentimes, cluttering our vision with opportunities to get smarter, connect with others or have some more fun. Or all of it at once. There’s data everywhere, a lot of people are analyzing a lot of interesting things to predict how things will go e.g. in finance, science and physics. With tons of education material online, you can master many crafts relevant in the offline or online world. Here, play your favorite childhood song on a ukulele you ordered online yesterday, and it’s so much fun! Let’s not forget about the AI guy in town that answers all types of questions. Last but not least, you can use your phone camera to place a lion in the middle of your living room.

Technology and the Internet’s symbiotic relationships created diverse opportunities for livelihood-making, moments of fun and perhaps most importantly, a sense of belonging.

Our techno-archeological footprint

Humanity, with our epic tales, quirks, heroes, weirdos & dramas found our place on the Internet. The Internet documented humanity’s best and worst moments. As time marched on, big tech made it easier to tell stories to people, near & far, friends & foes, all day all week. Here’s something my high school best friend ate for lunch in Norway. Oh, and the influencer I’m in a love-hate relationship with just moved to the city I live in.

Every post comes with a story. Citing the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, the writer Peter Brooks talks about how we’re left with mini narratives everywhere. There’s no place left for grand narratives, like progress, liberation or salvation, in our footprint. It’s mostly full of our imperfect stories with self-serving, greedy twists.

Economic impact of The Internet

1999 marked the year online shopping started with a huge burst. Nowadays, buying something is as simple as it gets. You can shop first or last thing in the day, while you pretend to work, during commute or in the bathtub.

The Internet is our biggest bazaar, the latest coolest shopping mall in town. There are so many shiny and perfect things. If you buy the right things at the same time, you can be this shiny and perfect, too.

Shaping generations

Coming of age online means witnessing so much. Bullying, peer pressure and individual complexes. All the while, you’re trying to better understand who you are and build your own narrative for your online self. It’s not an easy task.

Bo Burnham is often counted among the first YouTubers with a lively follower base. He tackles coming of age online in his 2018 movie Eighth Grade, and adds:

We really do spend so much time building narrative for ourselves, and I sense with people that there was a real pressure to view one’s life as something like a movie.

And you better have a strong narrative, or no one might want to watch that movie.

Radical emotions, extremist ideas & a mighty tool of mass deceit

Do you know what most folks want to watch, or consume online? Things that will bring them to tears, from anger or from sadness. Outrage. Paranoia. Shock.

We want to be surprised as we keep learning about the latest absurdities of becoming part of this wonderful mess we found ourselves inhabiting. That’s natural.

Things get unnatural as a bunch of paranoid opinions cut through everything else. When people turn to hatefulness to attempt to solve their problems. Hate spreads fast. Also through benevolent sharers who want to point at danger. Algorithms don’t care. If something gets interactions, it will drive profit and deserves a spotlight.

Polarization

Do you know what else drives profit? When there are more people creating more high-arousal content. Do you know how you get more of those? By putting like-minded individuals into the same groups.

Groupthink leads to consensus around more destructive options. This was studied many times, pioneered by Prof Myers’ 1970 study on the power of groups. When big tech wants more viral content, putting people with similar views into close circles usually does the trick. It’s human nature. Charming coincidence that this raises profits.

Each of us carries more journalistic power than before when we’re online. Not helping the spread of misinformation, hate speech or any other harmful conversation is part of our responsibility.

A hopeful outlook

We’re just starting to think more deeply about the type of Internet we want for ourselves. When I say we, I don’t only mean the practitioners intensely involved in co-creating healthy communities. I also mean regular users, who are sick of the flow of non-stop ads. People who have seen enough insincere, self-serving stories of others. Some others want to be loved and perhaps recently started to understand that this isn’t love.

Almost ten years ago, Internet expertsmade predictions for the Internet of 2025. It may have been that some developments were hindered along the way and some are cooking slower than expected. Still, a couple deserves highlighting in an attempt to sprinkle some hope into our gazing of the future:

• The Internet is blending into the background of our daily lives, giving us quick feedback for better decision-making. Especially in personal health and behavior change, supported by various innovations in user experience blending hardware, software and psychology.
• We are more aware of the massive disparities in access to health care, clear water, education, food, and human rights. There are more opportunities to come together for collective action to make sure all living beings lead more ecologically sustainable, dignified and fulfilling lives.
• Ian Peters, pioneer Internet activist and Internet rights advocate, fathomed that there would be many fragments of the Internet, controlled by a diverse set of protocols. It’s never too late to think about which fragments we each want to be a part of, and how we can make sure it’s as open, free, and as respectful and factual in its sociality as possible.

Further references

If you find yourself further pondering about all this, you may like what the following organizations have to say:

• World Wide Web Foundation
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Internet Engineering Task Force
• Community Data Science Collective
• Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society