The Use Of The Internet Technology

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Describe the development of the internet with a stress on the technical, social, political and economic impact that the Internet has had and is likely to have in the near future.

Internet Technology has evolved dramatically over the years and has had significant impact upon social and political interaction and largely affecting global economies. With continued Internet development, new opportunities are more accessible for individuals and organisation alike, but greater access also increases the potential to be exposed to various online threats.

Before Internet access can be obtained there are a few pieces of equipment and software required; a computer is essential, a telephone line and a router. The router will access the Internet through the telephone line and translate computer language, into a language that can travel across the phone lines, and vice versa. An account with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) is required; the ISP is a gateway to the Internet. Users access the ISP over the phone line, and the ISP will connect them to the Internet. The ISP provides users with e-mail and access to the Internet. It does this by utilising thousands of pounds worth of hardware and software, which the average user cannot afford. Users will have an account with the ISP and will pay £X per month in return for accessing the Internet through the ISP. This account will come with a user name and a password enabling the user to log onto the Internet.

A user needs two lots of software to connect to the Internet; the first is the software that connects a user to their ISP. This is different for each ISP; some ISP's will supply a disk with the connection software on it, other ISP's will use the connecting software that comes with the operating systems Windows 7 and OSX; which will give users the settings to put into this software.

The second lot of software required is a Browser. Browsers go and select web pages and display them on your computer. The two most popular and commonly used browsers are Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer. These browsers also provide the software for Electronic-Mail (e-mail) and to read Usenet newsgroups. If a user has a browser that’s solely for surfing, they will also need e-mail software.

The Internet had precursors, such as the telegraph system, that date back to the 19th century. The concept of data communication – transmitting data between two different places, connected via some kind of electromagnetic medium, such as radio or an electrical wire – predates the introduction of the first computers. Such communication systems were typically limited to point to point communication between two end devices. Telegraph systems and telex machines can be considered early precursors of this kind of communication (Internet Society; 2012).

The Internet began with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s; it was designed to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the major sites were down. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes (Howe; 2012).

The public was first introduced to the Internet when a message was sent from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock's laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), after the second piece of network equipment was installed at Stanford Research Institute. This connection not only enabled the first transmission to be made, but is also considered to be the first Internet backbone (Chapman; 2009).

This started point-to-point communication between mainframe computers and terminals, and expanded towards point-to-point connections between computers, and then early research into packet switching. Packet switched networks such as ARPANET, Mark I at NPL in the UK, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet were developed in the late 1960s using a variety of protocols. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking, where multiple separate networks could be joined together into a network of networks. With so many different network methods, something was needed to unify them. As a result, the TCP/IP architecture was first proposed by Bob Kahn at BBN and further developed by Kahn and Vint. It was adopted by the Defence Department in 1980, replacing the earlier Network Control Protocol (NCP) (Gilbert; 1995).

The migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP was officially completed on January 1, 1983 and the concept of a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks called the Internet was introduced (Cerf and Leiner; 2012).

By 1987, there were nearly 30,000 hosts on the Internet. The original Arpanet protocol had been limited to 1,000 hosts, but the adoption of the TCP/IP standard made larger numbers of hosts possible.

1977 was a great year for the development of the Internet. It was the year that the first PC modem, developed by Dennis Hayes and Dale Hetherington, was introduced and initially sold to computer hobbyists. A router is a device that forwards data packets between computer networks, creating an overlay internetwork. A router is connected to two or more data lines from different networks and when a data packet comes in on one of the lines, the router reads the address information in the packet in order to determine its ultimate destination. Then, using information in its routing table or routing policy, it directs the packet to the next network on its journey.

Routers perform the "traffic directing" functions on the Internet. A data packet is typically forwarded from one router to another through the networks that constitute the internetwork, until it reaches its destination node.

The most familiar type of routers are home and small office routers that simply pass data, such as web pages and email, between the home computers and the owner's cable or DSL modem, which connects to the Internet through an ISP. More sophisticated routers, such as enterprise routers, connect large business or ISP networks up to the powerful core routers that forward data at high speed along the optical fibre lines of the Internets’ backbone (Chapman; 2009).

Though routers are typically dedicated hardware devices, the use of software-based routers has become increasingly common. The very first device that had fundamentally the same functionality as what a router does today was the Interface Message Processor (IMP). IMPs were the devices that made up the ARPANET, the first packet network. The idea for a router (called "gateways" at the time) initially came about through an international group of computer networking researchers called the International Network Working Group (INWG).

Electronic mail (E-mail) was first developed in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, who also made the decision to use the "@" symbol to separate the user name from the computer name. As the demand for e-mail, FTP, and telnet were standardised, it became a lot easier for non-technical people to learn to use the internet. It was not easy by today's standards by any means, but it did open up use of the Internet to many more people, particularly in universities. Other departments besides libraries, computer, physics, and engineering departments found ways to make good use of the networks--to communicate with colleagues around the world and to share files and resources.

As popularity of e-mailing grew, the first modern email program was developed by John Vittal, a programmer at the University of Southern California, in 1975 (Chapman; 2009).

In 1989 another significant event took place, making the Internet easier to use. Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, more popularly known as CERN, proposed a new protocol for information distribution. This protocol, which became the World Wide Web in 1991, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet.

With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia, and navigate between them via hyperlinks; it is a great resource of information at the touch of a button.

The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in everyday speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web is not the same thing. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. In contrast, the Web is one of the services that run on the Internet; - it is a collection of text documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs, usually accessed by web browsers from web servers. In short, the Web can be thought of as an application "running" on the Internet (Cerf and Leiner; 2012).

The Internet has also created new forms of social interaction and relations such as social networking websites, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace.

There are ongoing debates about the impact of the Internet on strong and weak social ties, whether the internet is creating more or less social capital, the internet's role in trends towards social isolation, and whether it creates a more or less diverse social environment.

The internet is deeply embedded into groups and organisations all over the world. People can join a community and create new social contacts globally, which couldn’t be done so easily without the internet. One of the most negative aspects of the internet is that it alters the social behaviour, habits and abilities of people in their day to day lives. Children are often negatively influenced by the internet. Now, when nearly every household has a computer and access to the internet; people stay in to talk over the internet with their friends and families. Users are becoming younger and younger, and gradually becoming very competent experts on using the internet; but their real life experiences have been compromised (Temmel, et al.; 2001).

Users can also put their own information on the Internet via creating their own homepages or setting up a Business.

Software can be expensive and either be bought online or in store, but free software and free music is available on the Internet, you just have to download the program which is generally quick and easy to do.

Everybody’s personal situation is different. For many women, their own children are the main reason for staying at home. Nowadays this won’t be a problem because you can work on a computer at home via tele-working. Also men can take the opportunity to work at home. The advantages of tele-working will allow the parents of families to spend more time at home and probably more time with their children.

People can also organize their days how they want and meetings at the company are reduced to a minimum. Tele-working is also an advantage for the owner of the company, as people who work at home can be more motivated than their colleagues at the office.

The Internet has also achieved new relevance as a political tool. The presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 in the United States became famous for its ability to generate donations via the Internet, and the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama became even more so. Increasingly, social movements and organizations use the Internet to carry out both traditional and the new Internet activism.

Governments also have an increasing on-line presence. Some countries, such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Myanmar, the People's Republic of China, and Saudi Arabia, use filtering and censoring software to restrict what people in their countries can access on the Internet. In the UK, software can also be used to locate and arrest various individuals who are perceived as a threat.

On the other hand, the internet has introduced new problems to governments, individuals and the economy that require appropriate but costly management and prevention measures. These include a significant increase in cyber terrorism, online hacking, identity theft and overall computer related crime since 2001; furthermore extending into software piracy, that alone costs the software industry $12 billion globally, on an annual basis (Fundamentals of Information Systems, 2008; 399).

Policy makers are keenly aware of the Internet’s increasing economic importance but there is, as yet, no widely accepted methodology for assigning an economic or social value to the Internet economy. Understanding the economic and social impact of the Internet is vital because policy makers look to broadband and mobile data networks as platforms for innovation and development (Manyika; 2011).

The Internet, in an incredibly short amount of time, has emerged as a key driver of economic growth, creating millions of jobs that generate hundreds of billions of pounds in revenues.

The internet has empowered entrepreneurs to start new businesses and connect with customers around the world and it has provided users with access to unprecedented amounts of information.

It's important for policymakers to understand the social and economic benefits of the Internet. IAB announced the launch of the Long Tail Alliance; a group of small independent online businesses working to educate policymakers about the benefits of online advertising and to advocate against burdensome online restrictions that would damage the Internet economy.

As the Internet economy continues to grow, Members of Congress turn to groups like the Long Tail Alliance and the Google Small Business Network, to better understand the tremendous economic and social benefits of the internet and its benefits to small businesses and entrepreneurs across the globally.

One should not conclude that the Internet has finished changing. The Internet, although a network in name and geography, is a creature of the computer, not the traditional network of the telephone or television industry. It will and must, continue to change and evolve at the speed of the computer industry if it is to remain relevant.

The next big growth area is the surge towards universal wireless access, where almost everywhere is a "hot spot". Municipal Wi-Fi or city-wide access, wiMAX offering broader ranges than Wi-Fi, EV-DO, 4g, LTE, and other formats will joust for dominance. Another trend that is rapidly affecting web designers is the growth of smaller devices to connect to the Internet. Small tablets, pocket PCs, smart phones, eBooks, game machines, and even GPS devices are now capable of accessing the internet on the go; however there are still many web pages that are not designed to work on such devices.

The most pressing question for the future of the Internet is not how the technology will change, but how the process of change and the evolution will be managed. We now see debates over the control of domain name space, the form of the next generation IP addresses, and a struggle to find the next social structure that will guide the Internet into the future. The form of that structure will be hard to find, given the large number of concerned stakeholders.

At the same time, the industry struggles to find economic rationale for large investments needed for future growth; for example, to upgrade residential access to a more suitable technology.

If the Internet stumbles, it will not be because we lack for technology, vision, or motivation. It will be because we lack direction to collectively work towards the future.

As Heraclitus said in the 4th century BC, "Nothing is permanent, but change!" (Howe; 2012)