Media Systems and Communication Technology

Chapter 10 Overview

Summary and Learning Objectives

The Internet arose in the late 1960s out of efforts to share expensive computer resources provided by the military to universities across the United States. The initial network, called ARPAnet, went online for the first time in the fall of 1969. The network operated using packet switching, a method of transferring information that breaks down messages into small packets that are transmitted separately across the network and reassembled once they are received. Through e-mail and file sharing, ARPAnet soon became a tool used by academics to collaborate and communicate across the country.

As the number of incompatible networks grew in the 1970s, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocols that allowed the networks to communicate with each other. In 1983, ARPAnet started using the TCP/IP protocols. This is commonly seen as the true beginning of the Internet.

The Internet is unique among the mass media in allowing interpersonal communication through e-mail and instant messaging and group communication through e-mail, instant messaging, SMS, the World Wide Web, search, mobile apps, blogs, podcasts, and streaming media.

The World Wide Web was developed in 1989 by British physicist Tim Berners-Lee, while he was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. His goal was to produce a decentralized system for creating and sharing documents anywhere in the world. The web has three major components: the uniform resource locator (URL), the hypertext transfer protocol (http), and the hypertext markup language (HTML). Berners-Lee published the code for the World Wide Web on the Internet in 1991 for anyone in the world to use at no cost.

A growing part of online interaction is through social media, which is defined as media that allows for user-created content, comments, tagging, and social networking.

Video games are an emerging part of modern mass media that have been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as deserving full First Amendment protection. In addition to being a popular activity, video games, in the form of eSports, are also a spectator event now.

The Internet in general and the web, in particular, were based on a set of values known as the hacker ethic. This ethic holds that information should be freely distributed and that individuals should have as much control over computers as possible.

The World Wide Web has turned the Internet into a major mass medium that provides news, entertainment, and community interaction. The web offers a mix of content providers, including traditional media companies, new media companies offering publications available only on the web, aggregator sites that offer help in navigating the web, and individuals who have something they want to say.

The web has been criticized for elevating rumors to the level of news, making inappropriate material available to children, collecting private information about users, and creating a false sense of intimacy and interaction among users. This can be seen with the Russian hacking of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Over the past several years, the transmission of media content has been moving from channels of legacy media into those of online digital media, allowing people to access content when and where they want to.