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Thus, for example, many users think that the World Wide Web is ‘the Internet’. To most non-technical people, who experience the Internet as if it were a seamless whole, this will seem to be a technical detail, but as we shall see, the distinction is significant in terms of understanding the evolution of the system and in appreciating its capacity for disruption.Ī final conceptual error is the widespread tendency to confuse the network with one or more of the applications that people use. An example of the former is the widespread misapprehension that it is a unitary network rather than a network of computer networks. Other factors militating against a rounded appreciation of the Internet are definitional or conceptual. This is largely a product of two factors: the capacity of the network to enable unanticipated innovations and launch them into society, and the obsession of the mass media with the ‘New New Thing’. Like all technologies, it has been shaped not just by critical technical decisions made at various stages in its history, but also by accident and by economic, social, and cultural forces.Īnother factor occluding a clear understanding of the network is the short-termism of much public discourse about it, a trait that might be satirised as ‘the sociology of the last five minutes’. Yet there was nothing inevitable about the evolutionary path that the Internet has taken. This provides a misleading impression of a linear progression from one great idea to the next, and obscures the paths of development that could have been, but were not, taken. One is the distortion imposed by the ‘Whig interpretation’ 2 of Internet history – the tendency to view its development with the 20/20 vision provided by hindsight. Several factors make it difficult for citizens to appreciate the nature and significance of the Internet. 1 From this, various consequences flow: industries, economies, communities – and indeed whole societies – experiencing a wave of ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter 1942, 82–85) unleashed by the resulting technological change, and struggling to adapt to a rapid, and possibly accelerating, pace of development exposure to a range of new, and potentially dangerous, vulnerabilities the rise of new enterprises, and indeed whole industries, which would have been unthinkable without digital technology new kinds of crime, warfare, and espionage and the challenges of devising regulatory institutions which are fit for purpose in the digital age. Since utilities tend to be taken for granted (until they break down) and are generally poorly understood (because people are uninterested in how they work) industrial society now finds itself in the strange position of being utterly dependent on a technological system that is both very disruptive and yet is poorly, if at all, understood. So in a relatively short period the technology went from being something regarded as exotic, to an apparently mundane utility, like mains electricity. From the early 1990s, it began to percolate into mainstream society and is now (2016) widely regarded as a General Purpose Technology (GPT) without which modern society could not function. For the first two decades of its existence, it was the preserve of a technological, academic, and research elite. Research on its design commenced in 1973 and the network became operational in January 1983. the network of computer networks based on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/Internet Protocol (IP) suite of protocols (Postel 1981) – is now relatively old technology.