Forecasting The Future of The Internet
Since the creation of the internet in the early 80s, the technology used to enhance the internet has grown an immense amount in the short 40 years. During the early stages of the Internet, researchers were able to put together the “network of networks” and that is what has developed into the modern Internet. In the 90s computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. The web is actually the means of accessing data online in the forms of websites and hyperlinks.
The World Wide Web (WWW) began as a proposal in May of 1989 and again in 1990. Their project entailed “hypertext documents” that could be viewed by browsers. All of those words are regular vernacular for us media kids, but at the time they were new concepts being introduced. The first web page address used was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html . The screenshot below shows the browser running on a NeXT computer in 1993.
When the internet was at its beginning stages only computer scientists and very few others had access to the internet. It was slow and a lot more complicated than it is now. Users had to have very extensive knowledge of computer coding and mechanics. Eventually, developers created a reliable user-friendly browser that didn’t require a lot of knowledge of how computers worked.
By 1993, most of the internet traffic was reserved for remote access, e-mail, and file transfer. Only 1% was used for surfing the web. By the end of 1994, the Web had over 10 million users. The internet was developing quickly and becoming more accessible to everybody.
Today, I think a lot of us take our accessibility to the internet for granted. We are in a generation where we have access to the most information any generation has before. I think I Google something new every day. Yesterday, I spent hours looking up my cat's horoscope chart and trying to figure out how compatible we are. No other generation has been able to even think of doing something like that.
The future of the internet kind of seems scary after researching deep fakes and learning about all the security issues it can have. So in order to avoid triggering my anxiety I am going to talk about the hopeful uses of the internet.
The first and one of the largest things I think we’ll see is the effortless transfer of information. In the past, the internet responded slower and if there was specific information you wanted to find, you had to search for it. I think The Internet will become more of a background thing. A user won’t think about getting on the internet, they’ll just be on there and find the information they were looking for. TikTok is an app that already kind of aligns with my thoughts. Most days, I get on there with no intentions of finding anything specific, but on others, I open the app with intentions of finding a specific creator and they’ll be the first person that’s on my FYP. Maybe this is just me, but if I am talking about something specific with my friends TikTok always finds a way to bring it up.
I literally got on there while writing this to find an example and the 3rd TikTok was the one below. Yesterday, my friend and I were talking about how good “Child’s Play” by Drake is a great song. You see it on Facebook with ads that are targeting you with things you mentioned to your sister you wanted. I just think artificial intelligence will get to the point where it predicts your needs and wants so instead of going out of your way to find something specific it will effortlessly cater to users without us having to think. It’ll just know what we want to see.
@itsaustinrogers #drake #mygrandmother ♬ original sound - Austin Rogers
Another advancement I see is people using devices to monitor their health. We already have watches and other wearable devices that are used to monitor activity. I think that technology will continue to advance and will provide doctors with more information about a patient when trying to help alleviate any kind of issues they have.
I also think it is cool that the internet allows us to at least understand a little bit about our health. If someone has any concerns they can do a quick internet search. With a reliable source can figure out what could be the problem and a possible solution. Obviously, the internet can be a scary place and can lead to the spread of misinformation, but I've said this before and I'll say it 1000x more if you become internet literate than navigating the truth is not as intimidating as it seems.
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