Midterm Keyword — Internet

The term I chose to explore is Internet.

According to John Durham Peters, the term “the internet” has an all-encompassing complexity, and addresses a greater blend of elements than a single technology or medium. It is a term comparable to “the church,” or “the press.”

Definition

What does the word internet truly imply? Peters argues that it implies an assertion of power (Streeter, 2014). It empowers its users to transcend physical boundaries, develop relationships, obtain unattainable knowledge, and promote trade. Those are only a handful of examples of the assertion of power the internet offers to the public.

When we hear the word internet, our mind does not channel a singular visual. It is left up to interpretation, depending on how we utilize the internet most. A student may visualize a social media interface, while an older user may visualize a search engine or email interface. Those are just two of the many examples of cognitive visuals one might imagine when they hear the word internet, but the possibilities are endless.

The internet can serve a variety of purposes for a variety of people. It can be a utility, it can be a community, it can be a trade channel or even a means of education. In 2020, it fulfills so many of society’s necessities that it has almost weakened society in a way. En route to breaking down barriers and opening new frontiers, it’s also created a dependence upon itself among, essentially, the entire world.

Perspectives

It is an infamous criticism among the Baby Boomer generation, that the technology (the internet) of Millennials and neighboring generations, has made them “soft.” The internet, and its related technologies, have taken a collection of novel inconveniences out of modern life. These inconveniences may have played significant roles in sculpting the identities of a modern grandparent (Harris, 2019). Someone age 70 or older, could now be exposed to their college student descendent in 2020 never putting a stamp on a hand-written letter, never holding a newspaper, or consulting an expert in person. A grandparent in 2020, one who may hold conservative religious values, may be exposed to their college student descendent, through the use of the internet, develop a sex-first acquaintanceship without even meeting their presumptive partner in person.

It is through this perspective, that the term internet can associated with destruction. The power and necessity of the internet has made it a tool of destruction in rendering other utilities and social customs obsolete (Perera, 2014). The internet, and its convenient utilities, is not always the sole reason for these renderings, but it in almost all cases, enables them. For example, entertainment content creators have always sought to escape the limitations of television/radio networks. The advent of streaming services and internet-based user created content is what truly enabled this content to exist and be distributed to an unlimited audience. For a college student, this phenomena allows them to disregard the media consumption tools of their predecessors, and consume media that may have not been made mainstream through the primitive limitations of those older tools.

This is a unique period in history, where the utilities of the internet have become a granted part of mainstream life, while generations who lived without the internet still exist to criticize its effect and provide perspective on life without it. It is a period that could possibly end sooner than expected (Grieshaber, 2019), leaving a world without many people who have lived outside the filter of an internet-dominated lifestyle.

Meanwhile for younger generations, predominantly millennials, their perspective on the internet is a mundane one. The internet is taken for granted, and there is a lack of real consciousness for how big of an impact it is having on life at every given moment. The internet has become so background to modern life, that imagining life without it for a young person, could require a comparable mental dexterity needed to imagine life without language, art or retail (Carton, 2007).

The average day of a college student is more likely than not, to both begin and end in internet utilization. It’s almost reflex for a millennial to open their phone upon first waking up. Then several hours later, their phone, in more cases than not, the last thing they’ll touch before going to sleep. A study by Qualtrics and Accel shows that millennials check their phones 150 times per day (Brandon, 2017). When they open their phones, they’re using the internet in some capacity. Using the internet has become more frequent than even using the bathroom, and young people are numb to its frequency.

According to the same study, a survey showed that 91 percent of millennials say they have a healthy relationship with tech while most Boomers (57 percent) say tech has “ruined” relationships. This answer could be a result of the Boomers’ lack of understanding of tech, or the tech may have caused so much frustration among them and their peers, that they had no patience in maintaining the relationship if it meant doing so through technological means.

Will there be anyone left to resent technology once the last of Boomers have passed? Possibly.

Generations that haven’t been born yet could one day culminate a society that reverts to a tech-less dynamic. The only question is, how would we get there?

Economic recession is one avenue, but it would need to be one of a disastrous scale, that no living generation has ever seen. An economic meltdown that rivals the Great Depression could, in-theory, make development, production and shipping of tech-based internet products an unaffordable luxury among the masses, forcing us to revert to old-fashioned utilities and customs. However, even with an economic meltdown of necessary scale, society may continue to funnel what resources they do have into tech, due to an already-established dependence on it, similar to addiction. It’s become so essential to modern life, that families on limited resources could fathomably make the fiscal decision to prioritize tech over health care, education, dietary nourishment among other things, simply because they are dependent on the internet. They might have no choice, if all the old-fashioned tools that internet has come to replace, have already been universally phased out of practical existence, leaving them with no choice. It is a scenario that puts a grave perspective on the weight the word internet truly carries.

Or perhaps one day technology will culminate in a utopian world that has bred a society with no inconveniences, no boundaries or no consequences, similar to the one that Boomers believe millennials live in now. And in that utopian society, the limitlessness of how people live will drive them to ironically pursue a life void of internet-based influence. Perhaps the internet, and all of its ever-growing resources, will push humanity to achieve such a heightened sense of consciousness, that the only frontier they see left to conquer is a willing exodus from their addictive lifestyle with the internet. The Boomers would laugh in their graves.

Who knows what relationship future generations will have with the internet. If history is anything to go by, it’s that humans are capable of abandoning anything. They will always preserve distinct habits and passions, but the canvas they use changes with each passing generation. The internet, while historically prominent, isn’t immune to human’s willingness to render obsolete, as seen with the effects it’s had on other utilities.

The Legacy of The Internet

In the scope of history as we know it, internet already holds a significant place in technology and social advancement, despite its short period of existence. But Peters makes the case that the term internet could fall into disuse and historians may wonder why this ill-defined thing called “the internet” received so much attention. It is possible that rather than remembering the internet as this all-encompassing assertion of power, humanity will instead remember each individual application, hardware and software, that stemmed from the internet.

The great technological renaissance of the past few decades will instead be remembered for the smartphone, tablet and applications like Wikipedia and Netflix, while the concept of the internet is blurred by history for its generality.

Peters makes the case that the internet, rather than be remembered for its technological impact, could instead be remembered for its social, political and cultural impact. Laws were passed, stock bubbles inflated and collapsed, political campaigns launched, and a host of influential and broadly shared expectations about politics, economics, and social life were shaped by the term internet and the sets of assumptions it carried with it.

When a historian uses the term internet centuries from now, it could have a social context more than anything else. One could argue that the biggest impact the internet has made since its inception, is its influence in social interaction. For many, social interaction may be the first thought associated with the term the internet. The communication tools it has injected into society has made a possible a constant streams of communication, that could manifest throughout an entire day, with multiple communicators, regardless of location (Shklovski, 2006). DMs, group chats, face time, stories, it all feeds into a constant and compulsive socialization that is only made possible through the internet, and thus, the internet is credited with the very fabric of the bulk social interaction in 2020. History might remember the internet with the same significance that it remembers the mouth or the ear.

Works Cited

Streeter, Thomas. “Internet — Digital Keywords.” Culture Digitally, 29 Sept. 2014, culturedigitally.org/2014/09/internet-draft-digitalkeywords/.

Harris, Sarah, et al. “How Baby Boomers Use The Internet.” Allconnect, 3 Oct. 2019, www.allconnect.com/blog/baby-boomers-and-the-internet.

Perera, Ayesha. “Maps, Privacy and That Blind Date: 25 Things the Internet Has Made Obsolete- Technology News, Firstpost.” Tech2, 12 Mar. 2014, www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/from-maps-to-privacy-25-things-the-internet-has-made-obsolete-3648893.html.

Grieshaber, Kirsten. Associated Press. “2019: When Millennials Overtake Boomers.” Mail Tribune, Mail Tribune, 28 Jan. 2019, mailtribune.com/news/happening-now/2019-when-millennials-overtake-boomers.

Carton, Sean. “The Internet as Society’s Subconscious.” ClickZ, 23 July 2007, www.clickz.com/the-internet-as-societys-subconscious/76078/.

Brandon, John. “The Surprising Reason Millennials Check Their Phones 150 Times a Day.” Inc.com, Inc., 17 Apr. 2017, www.inc.com/john-brandon/science-says-this-is-the-reason-millennials-check-their-phones-150-times-per-day.html.

Shklovski, I., Kiesler, S., & Kraut, R. (2006). The Internet and social interaction: A meta-analysis and critique of studies, 1995–2003. In R. Kraut, M. Brynin, & S. Kiesler (Eds.), Oxford series in human-technology interaction. Computers, phones, and the Internet: Domesticating information technology (p. 251–264). Oxford University Press.