To say that the world has undergone a revolution since the 1990's is an understatement and yet for some reason this revolution hasn't yet been given a label, such as in the case of the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps it is because this revolution has quietly insinuated itself into our lives, been embraced with gusto and left us all slightly dumbstruck, addicted and so engrossed that no one has thought to give it either credit or a name.
Differing from those other two types of revolution, political and orbital revolutions, a cultural revolution can be defined as a dramatic and wide-reaching change and, since 1990, that is exactly what has happened and it has affected every person on the planet. Back in the eighties a lecturer at the university I was attending told us that the coming era was the Communication Age. I was studying Media and Communications at the time and yet his statement didn't really hit home as it should have, but then no one could really anticipate the massive changes that were about to take place.
I finished my degree in 1990, just before the internet hit the ground running. We had computers of course, but, at that stage, no one had access to the internet because it wasn't available in the public domain until 1993, except perhaps to scientists and the military. My lecturer was obviously up to speed, however, and could see where things were heading.
From the 1960's, evolutions in computers and technology gradually led to computer networks and, progressively, to the internet. A universal communication standard (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol TCP/IP) was developed to allow networks to communicate with one another. In 1989-90 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, a system of linked hypertext documents and pages that could be accessed by a browser, making the internet user-friendly and accessible to the public. In 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software into the global domain and the world hasn't been the same since.
By the time I finished my studies, I had heard of the internet and first came across it when visiting an office where my, then, husband worked. One of his co-workers could access it on his computer as a business tool and I asked to see it. I don't remember particularly what I saw and Windows wasn't available at the time, so it would probably just have been a lot of uninteresting text and figures. This was in the early nineties when mobile phones were the size of bricks and certainly weren't smart. They also didn't have cameras; text messaging was probably the first big advance as they evolved and internet connection a mere dream.
The internet brought a huge change to the way business was done, while creating business opportunities and destroying others as well. Later on, when social media allowed people to flood the internet with images and opinions, some people became famous simply for promoting themselves online. They didn't actually have to do anything other than be in your face and have an opinion then ask people to 'follow' them. What the internet has given us is a much clearer picture of the ratio of intelligent compared to not very intelligent people that exist among the eight billion or so souls inhabiting our planet.
Those eight billion people can now communicate with each other easily and en masse, put forward their opinions and read everyone else's. In a way it's almost as good as having telepathy and an insight into everyone else's minds. Apart from the dross and the sheer joy of communicating at will with so many people, the benefits have been huge. Knowledge previously only accessible through searches in libraries and contained in books is now available instantly simply by using a search engine. So many fields, including research and medicine, have benefitted from the amount of shared knowledge and speed of access.
Thinking of how businesses have been affected, consider the publishers of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Such resources as this have accumulated vast quantities of knowledge on every conceivable subject over decades and set it down in indexed volumes. The final printed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica was a 32-volume set published in 2010 and cost AU$1,395. Following that it focused entirely on its online version. Then along came search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, to name a few. Well, I'm sure those very search engines use the Encyclopedia Britannica online version now, and, probably, have to pay a subscription to do so, along with the other sources they access. There is a free online version of Encyclopedia Britannica that is supported by advertising, but it is limited in scope. If you want the full version, you need to subscribe.
No matter how many types of businesses suffered incredible upheaval with the arrival of the internet, an enormous number benefitted from it but, even more importantly, people used the internet to create businesses that would flourish on an online, global platform. The internet created billionaires and is still creating billionaires.
It would be impossible to fully discuss everything that the internet has brought about and all its repercussions. I'll probably only give a few examples in this post because it is a huge subject. The internet also shows us that whatever is good in life can, equally, have a bad side but that is true about all things. Everyone with children worries about screen time and the effect it will have on them, from small children to teenagers. Having three grandchildren, I've watched firsthand how incredibly well they have taken to technology. It's really no wonder as their brains are fresh and uncluttered. It's why they learn language so quickly. My two eldest grandchildren have i-pads and now laptops for school. The youngest has an i-pad on which he sits wearing his headphones, playing suitable-for-age and often educational, games. Their screen time is rationed by their parents.
My granddaughter expertly searches the internet for video art tutorials to learn how to draw. She's not just glued to the screen; she's using the internet as a resource and educational tool. She recently showed me a site about what type of marine creatures live at what depths of the ocean, from the surface to where there is no light. She is nine and she finds lots of things of interest that are designed for people her age. They're at an age of curiosity and want to learn, not just play computer games. She also plays interactive games with friends online. I've very impressed with what's available online for kids to use as resources and to discover the world.
When he was in primary school, my eldest grandchild who is now twelve, used a program on which his school set him math's homework called Mathletics. Students can access it and do it on their devices without the paper and the mess, then the teacher logs in and marks it there. Honestly, if I was a seven-year-old again and a fairy godmother came along and told me she would wave her magic wand and create a box that would let me play games, talk to my friends, show me how to do things like draw or build things, teach me, show me movies and places and take pictures, that I could then print, I would think that I had landed the best fairy godmother in the world. Either that or that a time-traveler had popped into my bedroom from the future. As I don't believe in fairy godmothers and I'm a logical person, it would have to be a time-traveler.
The internet allied with GPS, Global Positioning System, allows us to navigate in our cars, planes etc. The GPS can ascertain our position, but will just give points of latitude and longitude, which wouldn't make much sense without a map. Using an app like Google Maps, map data is downloaded over the internet so that your position can be viewed along with roads, points of interest and directions. The first GPS apps that were made available for purchase over a decade ago were very expensive. Now we can just upload them to our phones with little or no cost.
Life is being made easier and easier for us in many ways, thanks to the internet but harder for some in so many other ways. Cyber security is now a thing. Hacking is a thing. Money scams are a thing. Governments have dedicated cyber security departments because hackers can access military intelligence. Once, if you were a spy, you needed to be able to access a computer physically or break in somewhere with a mini camera and photograph files. Now the secrets come in a stream of zeroes and ones on optic fibre. It's not just the military that has to protect itself online. Identities can be stolen as well as your money but online banking and paying your bills is wonderful and time saving. Queuing in banks is something we can all still remember and is one of life's drudges. The internet has truly been like magic in allowing us to move our money around at light speed without having to walk into a bank.
Because of email, post offices have suffered massive losses as paper mail has decreased, however, online shopping has put life back into these institutions that now have massively increased parcel deliveries thanks to online shopping. Large department stores have suffered thanks to so many online retailers but are fighting back by offering their goods online as well. Many have reduced their number of actual stores as a consequence.
IMPLICATIONS:
Children raised past the year 2000 will feel as lost without the internet just as those of us raised with electricity in our homes are at a loss as what to do in a blackout. We no longer have wood fired stoves and, at night, are used to television and radio to entertain us. The youth of today have grown up with the internet are used to having information, entertainment and social interaction on demand. It is stimulating and addictive. If the internet suddenly ceased to exist in their lives, I believe most would feel thrown into a void, and it is understandable.
What they must learn through parents, older people and educators is how to be self-reliant without the internet in terms of both communication, research and find other interests not allied to being reliant their devices. How to access information the old way - a physical search through books in libraries. Books and hard copy of information must always be available. If all knowledge was only available on the Cloud in the future and we lost access to the internet, humanity would be thrown back into the dark ages.
I have always thought it would be a good idea if children from the age of, say, ten and onwards through their teens were given the chance to attend camps for two weeks every year where they could learn basic and fundamental survival skills. This would include making fire, growing food and hunting (including preparing raw meat), making shelters, orienteering, finding and purifying water and basic first aid. These are just a few things that most of us raised in modern times would find difficult to do. The more children are raised as technology progresses, the less able to fend for themselves our descendants will become should disasters or war destroy our technology.
People born from the late 1940's onwards grew up with television and we have all felt very privileged to have entertainment and information so readily available to us. Fifty years prior to that there was no phone, no radio or television and later on cars and flight took a few decades to become available to the masses. Electricity also took decades before it was available in most areas. Vaccinations and antibiotics were a huge benefit to mankind. As someone born in 1952, I felt I had really been lucky to be born with access to all these things.
We sailed along quite nicely with these inventions for some decades, not really feeling the need for much else and all the while companies like IBM, Intel and Arpanet were working at progressing computers. By the 1960's we'd heard about them but didn't imagine that they'd be used by anyone but businesses, universities or researchers. We couldn't have imagined that they'd become as integral to our homes as our refrigerators.
MINICOMPUTERS AS THEY WERE.
By the time I dropped out of studying for a Bachelor of Science at University in 1972, computers had moved into the business world. Some took up an entire room that required constant cooling, but minicomputers were becoming available as I would soon discover. Post university my parents couldn't stand having me sit around not knowing what to do with myself and they encouraged me to take a course in something that interested me (i.e. that paid). Nothing did interest me but, due to pressure, I decided to take a Computer Programming Course with the Control Data Company. This cost money that I was expected to pay off.
I got through this in six months and was employed by Burroughs Ltd., a company that made minicomputers. I coded accounting packages in Cobol on grid paper in an office (when people were still allowed to smoke at work) before the coding was compiled on another computer somewhere else and returned in holes punched on paper tape in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange - a computer code that assigns a numerical value to basic English letters, characters, and symbols - that could be fed into the minicomputer to program it. The computer had no screen or VDU (Visual Display Unit). Screens have made computers user friendly. It's like giving them a face, eyes, ears and a mouth. Interacting with a minicomputer back then was just programming it and then testing if the program worked. You fed it data then checked the printed output to see if it did what you wanted it to do.
I lasted nine months in this tedium that I decided wasn't living. I doubted that I ever paid my parents back. Today's personal computers are compact, have screens and, if you're clever, you can even write programs them. I can't because I lost interest long ago. Windows made computers far more user friendly and fun. I almost wish I'd stuck with programming. There was money there if I'd become proficient. I even went back to university and studied Computer Science for one year. I transferred and did an Arts degree instead. Honestly, I never did make real money.
People don't really write programs anymore, I'm told. They make them using Sub-Routines, which are basically pre-existing programs. When people tell me they work in I.T., I assume they are technical. In fact, they can be in sales, network administration or installing software or hardware. No one, anymore, says that they're a programmer, in fact, I don't think most people know what it means.
WHERE IT REALLY COMES FROM.
I have, until recently, laboured under the impression that the internet is mostly brought to us through satellites. How wrong I was. It turns out that undersea fibre-optic cables carry approximately 99% of all international internet traffic. Satellites are used for hard-to-access and remote areas where laying cables is not feasible. I had previously thought that one of the few useful benefits of the space race was that the internet relied on satellites. It is interesting to note that undersea cables have been being laid for 170 years. The first were copper and transmitted telegraph signals. In the mid-twentieth century coaxial cables carried telephone service, and the first fiber optic cable was laid in 1988. You live and learn.
A lot of hard work, such as laying all that cable over thousands of miles of ocean, that has gone into bringing the internet to people all over the globe. The foundations were laid years ago and layer upon layer of emerging technologies progressed and combined to give us instant communication and access to more information and knowledge than we could ever possibly absorb. Billions of people have created their own web pages: everyday people, learned institutions, research entities, governments, media empires, utility providers, banks, your local kindergarten, influencers (a word I simply cannot stand), small and large businesses and lots of people who want to sell you things. The list is endless. You name it, it's probably there as well as the so named 'dark web'.
Whatever you think of it and however you use it, the internet has brought something akin to magic into our lives. The internet is a positive addition to our lives. It definitely has its negatives, but that arises from the use made of it by human beings.
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