The Internet, Web, and Social media

Through out the beginning of the personal computer or the PC the leader of the industry was IBM. IBM is a company that is very regimented. They had all employees dress in Navy Blue pinstripe suits and encouraged their employees to communicate with each other as much as possible. This company decided to stay away from the software and manufacturing of PC's and decided to focus on teh hardware as they had always done. Apple, a competitor of IBM, had created a new image with the help of Steve Jobs. They created an image that was new and hip and attracted a very artistic and creative crowd. Apple had gone down hill when Jobs left the company, but when he came back with the invention of the iPod Apple once again flourished. In chapters 8 and 9 of "Communication and Cyberspace" individuals go on to describe the internet, which they call an information superhighway. William Gibson went on to coin the term cyberspace, which he describes as a consensual hallucination. His vision of the internet and cyberspace was that it is a transnational capitalism run amok. An obstacle in this era was Interface Message Processors or IMP's. IMP gives computers the ability to talk to each other if they were produced by the same manufacturer. The internet or computer network has been created from the beginning by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as a part of their defense strategy. Their thought was to create a decentralized network so that if one part of the network was attacked or went down the other parts would fill in and there would be no loss of connection. These networks consist of many components such as terminals and nodes. Terminals are not endpoints which are not connected to each other, but to a main frame. Nodes are interconnected within the network. In 1969 ARPAnet was commissioned by the department of defense and the key to this system was packet switching. Packet switching is where several packets are sent to one destination, the nodes reroute in accordance with how easy it is to reach its end point, and they come back together at their destination. Mosco has many views about the electronic age, but one that stood out to me was that in an electric age information has been increasingly modified. Another idea that intrigued me was the thought that cyberspace has no limits and or no barriers and will expand as information increases. With discoveries like prodigy, America online and the WEB our society has become greatly entwined in the internet and all that it has to offer. Within the text we have been reading they speak of a "digital divide, which is the gap between those who have access to and use the internet and those who do not(166)". This idea enlightens you on how the world has increasingly progressed through the years. Thoughts from the text and thoughts of my own hope that this gap is lessened each and every passing day