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• The Internet and the Pandemic
• 1. How the internet and technology shaped Americans’ personal experiences amid COVID-19

Table of Contents

• 2. Parents, their children and school during the pandemic
• 3. Navigating technological challenges
• 4. The role of technology in COVID-19 vaccine registration
• Acknowledgments
• Methodology

As the pandemic unfolded in spring 2020, many Americans saw their lives swiftly reshaped by  stay-at-home orders , school closures  and the onset of  remote work . From video calls with  isolating or sick family members  to  holiday celebrations by video call  amid  canceled travel plans , social distancing recommendations altered major life events and elements of daily life alike. 

Technology bridged physical distance as restrictions continued.  Religious services ,  doctor appointments  and  essential errands  moved online. At the same time, organizations implementing remote work and Americans spending more time online worried about “ Zoom fatigue ” and tech burnout.

Relationships also evolved during this uprooting of typical routines. Pandemic “pods” helped some Americans  maintain connection , but they  complicated relationships  and family dynamics at the same time. In some cases, friendships  relied on technology  to stay afloat. And others needed to find new ways to connect amid  growing isolation . 

With this broader societal context in mind, this chapter explores the ways in which Americans’ lives changed in the pandemic – and the ways that technology was a part of several transitions. Results from the April 2021 Pew Research Center survey show that even as a majority of Americans considered the internet essential to them personally during the pandemic and four-in-ten used tech in new ways, some feel worn out or fatigued from video calls and a quarter feel less close to close family members than before the coronavirus outbreak. The following sections explore these findings. 

58% of adults say the internet has been essential during the pandemic, and for some groups, its importance grew over the past year

The share of Americans who describe the internet as essential for them during the pandemic has risen slightly over the past year. As of April 2021, 58% of U.S. adults say this,  compared with 53%  in an April 2020 Center survey. 

Americans varied in their reliance on the internet and some of the key differences relate to age, race and ethnicity, educational attainment, income and community type. For example, roughly seven-in-ten adults ages 18 to 49 (69%) say the internet has been essential to them personally, compared with half of those ages 50 to 64 and about four-in-ten Americans 65 and older. 

Additionally, about six-in-ten of those living in urban or suburban areas (61% each) say the internet has been essential to them, compared with a smaller share of those living in rural locales (48%) who say the same. While at least half of adults across major racial and ethnic groups say this connectivity has been essential, Hispanic adults (65%) are more likely to say so than White adults (54%). Some 58% of Black Americans say the internet has been essential in this way.

Several of the groups that are less likely to say the internet has been essential also have lower rates of home broadband adoption and smartphone access, according to  other Center research . For example,  digital divides have persisted  in recent years even as Americans with lower incomes have made gains in tech adoption. And as of 2021, a quarter of U.S. adults 65 and older  say they do not use the internet .

For some groups, the importance of the internet has grown over the past year – especially when it comes to age and educational attainment. The share of adults ages 18 to 29 who say it has been essential during the pandemic rose 10 percentage points between April 2020 and April 2021. Similarly, roughly four-in-ten adults 65 and older (38%) now say the internet has been essential to them, compared with about three-in-ten who said so in April 2020. 

Americans with higher levels of educational attainment are more likely today than a year ago to say the internet has been essential to them during the pandemic. For example, 71% of those with a bachelor’s or advanced degree say this, up from 65% in 2020. This uptick also appears for those with some college experience, while sentiments among those with a high school education or less have remained stable.

Looking at older Americans specifically, adults ages 65 and older with a bachelor’s degree or more education are more likely now to say the internet has been essential to them personally (50% say so) compared with a year ago (39%) – an 11 percentage point increase. By contrast, among those 65 and older who have less education, the shares saying it has been essential are similar between the two time points (27% in 2020 and 32% in 2021). 

Adults ages 50 to 64 with a bachelor’s or advanced degree are also more likely now to say the internet has been personally essential (a 7-point increase since 2020), while there has been no change for those in that age group with less formal education.

81% of Americans have used video calling and conferencing during the pandemic

As Americans increasingly lived their lives from home, video calling and conferencing platforms became a venue for everything from  celebrating holidays with family and friends  to conducting remote meetings or  visiting doctors . 

Roughly eight-in-ten Americans (81%) say they have talked with others via video calls since the beginning of the pandemic. One-in-five have done so about once a day or more often, including 12% who say they are on video calls several times a day. Another three-in-ten have done this about once a week (12%) or a few times a week (18%), and a similar share use video calls every few weeks (16%) or less often (15%).

While there are  many ways  people can spend their time on video calls, the survey finds that working from home is particularly associated with this type of screen time. 

In this survey, 17% of Americans say they were employed full or part time and working from home all or most of the time as of April. 7 Among them, 46% say they have used video calling about daily or several times a day during the pandemic. Another 12% of the full adult population was employed full or part time and working from home some of the time or rarely at the time of the survey. Among that group, 28% say they have used video calling about daily or more. And among the 28% of U.S. adults who were working but never from home, 13% say they are on daily or more frequent video calls. 

Aside from work-from-home status, how often people use video calls varies by several other demographics. Black and Hispanic adults are more likely to have used video calling than White adults. Hispanic adults are more likely than White Americans to have done so several times a day or about daily. Meanwhile, while about two-thirds of adults 65 and older have made video calls in the pandemic,  daily  use is more common among younger adults. About a quarter of those 18 to 29 (28%) and 30 to 49 (26%) say they have done this about daily or more often, compared with 16% of those 50 to 64 and 7% of adults 65 and older. 

Frequency of video calling varies by education as well. About a third of adults with at least a bachelor’s degree say they have done this at least once a day, compared with smaller shares of those with less formal education.

In their own words, Americans describe how they have used technology or the internet in new or different ways during the pandemic 

As the severity of the pandemic grew, some Americans were faced with performing everything from their social interactions to their work or schooling online. Four-in-ten Americans say they used digital technology or the internet in new or different ways compared with before the outbreak began. Still, an even larger share – 59% – say their tech use has not changed in this way.

As is the case with  digital divides in internet use  and  tech adoption  in general, those with more formal education and higher incomes are more likely to have had new or different experiences with tech in the pandemic. For example, 56% of those with at least a bachelor’s degree say they have used technology in ways new or different to them, compared with 37% of those with some college experience and 29% of those with a high school diploma or less. Similarly, 46% of those with higher household incomes say so, compared with a smaller share of those with lower (38%) or middle incomes (40%).

Women are also more likely than men to say they have used digital technology or the internet in new and different ways (43% vs. 36%), as are adults under 50 (46%) compared with those who are 50 and older (33%). 

When asked to describe what these new and different ways are, 43% mention encountering at least one form of video calls or conferences new to them in the pandemic. From weddings to funerals, church meetings to calls with family, some of these adults report their lives moved largely onto video platforms:

“We now hold bi-weekly family meetings on Zoom to make sure we are all doing okay. Before we just had individual phone calls with family members. We used Vimeo for my mother’s funeral so people could watch her funeral mass. She died of COVID-19. I used Zoom for work meetings.” – Woman, 57

“[I have had] Zoom meetings [and] Microsoft Teams meetings. [I’ve had] increased FaceTime family meetings. [I had] job interviews via the internet.” – Man, 46

“[I have been] teaching writing classes over Zoom [and I] dated someone over FaceTime for 3 months. [I] attended various online events.” – Woman, 24

While about a quarter of Americans who have used tech in new ways mention video calls generally, roughly one-in-ten (8%) referenced the remote work aspect of video conferencing specifically:

“Most of my work-related meetings are no longer in-person, but on Zoom or Teams. Instead of attending professional conferences in person, all of them are now virtual meetings. It took a bit to get comfortable with such drastic change.” – Man, 63

A similar share (8%) talk about using video calling to connect with family and friends, or attend social events or “video holidays”:

“It has opened me up to using video chat to connect with physically distanced friends. I have people that I used to only see on Facebook or in person two times a year but now we do a group video chat once a month and I am closer to them than ever.” – Woman, 39

Smaller shares discuss the move to online learning and the use of video platforms (5%) or using video calls for telehealth (4%):

“[I] had to learn how to use Google Classroom to help my son with his hybrid learning. I also did my first tele-visit with my GP doctor and I am disabled so it turns out I’ll be able to continue to use that technology once the pandemic is over to make it easier! … Not to mention, I’ve attended various social gatherings that, due to my disability, I wouldn’t have been able to attend under normal circumstances!” – Man, 28

Aside from video calls, 16% of Americans said they have used technology or the internet to obtain groceries, food or other essentials, or to perform services like banking or document signing:

“Shopping (especially groceries and home supplies) online through various different places, permanently eliminating the need to physically go to the grocery store for most shopping activities.” – Man, 42

“Ordering groceries, ordering tags for my car, doctor’s appointments, paying insurance premiums, paying bills and keeping in touch with family and friends.” – Woman, 78

In addition to those who mention remote work and online learning in the context of video calls, another 13% mention using technology in new ways for remote work and another 7% for online learning:

“Before the outbreak, I was the typical pen and paper type of middle school math teacher. After the outbreak, I have become a much more proficient virtual math teacher who has embraced many new platforms [that] have made my job easier. I have recently become fully vaccinated and returned to the brick and mortar school environment, but will maintain many of the new skills which I learned virtually.” – Man, 62

“We needed to get the internet for our granddaughter to be able to get her education while she’s home during the pandemic.” – Woman, 53

Others specifically note how they are now relying on the strength or quality of their connection in a new way:

“I upgraded my internet (was just using a hotspot previously) and for my work, I am connected all day through the workday. If the internet goes down, my ability to work at home decreases significantly. Before the work from home started, if I lost the ability to connect to the internet, it only affected me in terms of annoyance at not being able to surf the net.” – Woman, 50

Finally, other Americans have used social media and other technology for entertainment (7%), to keep up social interaction, especially on social media (5%), to find and search for information (4%), or attend online religious services or activities (3%). And their use of these digital technologies has sometimes changed over the course of the pandemic.

“I never really used Twitter before. Now I follow some important public health figures and medical doctors who are working for the CDC, etc., so I can be informed on what is going on with COVID-19 and treatment options.” – Woman, 53

“Pre-COVID-19 and even well into the pandemic, I was using the internet/my smartphone to spend countless hours on social media. Somewhere in there I deleted most of the social media apps from my phone and have been using it to read e-books and plan creative projects, mostly home improvements.” – Woman, 34

“I now attend church services online rather than in person, which I had not done before the outbreak.” – Man, 36

68% of Americans say digital interactions have been useful – but not a replacement for in-person connection

In late March 2020, as stay-at home orders upended American life, a  Center survey  asked U.S. adults to speculate on whether digital interactions – that is, everyday interactions that might have to be done online or by telephone because of recommended limits on social contact during the coronavirus outbreak – would be suitable replacement for in-person contact. At the time, about a quarter of Americans said digital encounters would be just as good (27%), and 8% believed that they wouldn’t be of much help. Some 64% said they would be useful, but not a replacement.

In this new survey, Americans were asked to assess how digital encounters used to replace social contact have actually gone. When asked to think about everyday interactions that happened online or by telephone rather than in person, 17% say that these have been just as good as in-person contact. In line with Americans’ own expectations a year ago, the majority of Americans – 68% – say that interactions that have moved online or to the phone have been useful, but not a replacement for in-person. Some 15% say these interactions haven’t been of much use. 

Considering the more recent findings about people’s experiences, relatively small shares across demographic groups say these types of digital interactions have been just as good as in-person contact. Still, there are some small differences by race and ethnicity, age and formal educational attainment in this respect. Adults ages 18 to 29 were more skeptical than older adults in March 2020 – 21% said these interactions would be just as good as in-person contact, compared with a somewhat larger share (29%) of Americans 65 and older. In the new survey, some 23% of adults ages 18 to 29 say these interactions have been just as good as in-person contact, while a  smaller  share (12%) of those 65 and older who feel this way about the utility of their digital interactions. 

In March 2020, Black adults were more likely than White adults to think digital interactions would be just as good as in-person contact. Black and Hispanic adults are also more likely than White adults to say these interactions have been just as good in the new survey. At the same time, about another quarter of Black adults say that these digital interactions have not been of much use. Smaller shares of White and Hispanic adults say the same.

Both then and now, how useful Americans say these interactions have been also varies by educational attainment.

A quarter of Americans feel less close to close family members than before pandemic; about four-in-ten say the same about friends they know well

Some accounts of the pandemic  have lamented the potential loss of casual friendships and acquaintances as COVID-19 narrowed people’s social circles and family structures into smaller  bubbles . At the same time, some  living with friends or family members  may have faced increased time spent together as stay-at-home orders were imposed to combat COVID-19. Others  living alone  faced possible challenges of staying in touch with those close to them.

The new survey reveals that some people feel their social relationships and their connections to those in their personal networks have been in flux during the pandemic. About half of Americans (53%) say they feel less close to casual acquaintances compared with before the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak in February 2020. Some 38% say the same about friends they know well. And a quarter of Americans say they now feel less close to close family members.

At the same time, about one fifth of adults (22%) say they feel  more close  to close family members than they did before the pandemic. Smaller shares say this about friends they know well and casual acquaintances. 

And despite the pandemic upheaval, about half say their relationships with close family members (53%) and friends they know well (47%) have stayed about as close as before, while roughly four-in-ten (41%) say this about casual acquaintances. 

Some groups are more likely to report change in the closeness of their relationships than others. Hispanic and Black adults are less likely than White adults to say the closeness of their relationships with close family and friends has stayed about the same compared with before the beginning of the pandemic. 

When it comes to close family members, similar shares of Hispanic adults say these relationships feel closer than before (30%) and less close than before (31%). Compared with White adults, they are also more likely to say they feel closer to close family, and friends they know well.

Americans with lower incomes are also more likely than others to say they feel less close to close family members compared with before the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak. About three-in-ten of those with lower incomes say so. At the same time, a fifth of Americans with lower incomes say they feel more close to close family, and 48% say they feel about as close to these family members as before the pandemic.

There is little difference in how Americans in various age groups describe the pandemic’s impact on closeness of their family relationships. But when it comes to friends they know well, young adults ages 18 to 29 are more likely to say they now feel closer to these friends than those in any other age group. Still, only about a fifth (22%) of young adults say so.

Finally, small shares of adults across gender, racial and ethnic, age and income groups say they feel closer to casual acquaintances than they did before – no more than about one-in-ten across any of these groups. In each case, far larger shares say they feel less close now.

Women are slightly more likely than men to say they feel less close to acquaintances, as are Americans with lower incomes compared with those in the upper-income tier. Those who live in urban (57%) or suburban (54%) areas are more likely to say their relationships with casual acquaintances are less close now, compared with those who live in rural areas (46%).

Majorities say texts or group messaging apps, voice and video calls have helped them at least a little to stay connected to family and friends

For some, technology became a way to stay in touch with others whom they could not visit in person since the pandemic began. About seven-in-ten Americans say text messages or group messaging apps have helped them personally to stay connected with their family and friends at least a little. Roughly six-in-ten or more say the same about voice (65%) and video calls (59%). Smaller shares say this about social media sites or email.

Americans’ reliance on technology early in the pandemic was apparent in several ways, from  using technology to communicate with others  to  hosting virtual gatherings . Over a year into the pandemic, results from the new survey show that key communications platforms have been more likely to be helpful for some groups than others. 

For each of the five technologies asked about in the survey, Black and Hispanic adults are more likely than White adults to say these technologies have helped them a lot to stay connected. For example, 58% of Hispanic adults say that text messages or group messaging apps have helped them a lot, personally, to stay connected with their family and friends. Some 49% of Black adults and a smaller share (39%) of White adults say the same. Voice calls have helped about half of Black and Hispanic adults a lot to stay in touch, compared with a third of White adults. Similar patterns hold for video calls, social media sites and email.

There are also differences by gender, with women being more likely than men to say that each of these technologies have helped them a lot to stay connected to friends and family.

Adults ages 18 to 29 are more likely than those 65 and older to say video calls and social media sites have helped a lot in staying connected with family and friends.

The reverse is true for email: Some 28% of Americans 65 and older say that this has helped them a lot to stay in touch, compared with smaller shares of younger Americans. Those 65 and older are also more likely than those 30 to 64 to say voice calls have helped a lot. 

Other technologies – for example, text messages or group messaging apps – have been similarly helpful for Americans across age groups. Across age groups, four-in-ten or more Americans say these have helped a lot with staying in touch. 

36% of Americans say their personal lives changed in a major way

As context for this exploration of how people’s technology use and experiences were affected by the pandemic, the survey also asked Americans about the overall impact of the pandemic on their personal lives.

Some 36% of Americans say their own personal life has changed in a major way as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. Another 47% say their personal life has changed, but only a little bit. And 16% say that it has stayed about the same as it was before the outbreak. 

Women are somewhat more likely than men to say life has changed in a major way (39% vs. 33%), as are those with a bachelor’s or advanced degree (40%) compared with those with some college (35%) or a high school diploma or less formal education (34%). And Americans living in urban (41%) and suburban areas (37%) are more likely to say this than those living in rural areas (30%).

About half of those who say their personal lives have changed in a major way (52%) say they have used technology in new ways during the pandemic, compared with 38% of those who say their personal lives have changed a little bit and 19% of those who say life stayed about the same. At the same time, roughly seven-in-ten Americans reporting major changes in life (73%) or with more modest levels of change (69%) say digital interactions have been useful, but not a replacement for in-person interactions, compared with a smaller share among those who say their personal lives stayed about the same (52%). 

Those who say their lives stayed about the same are also more likely than others to say interactions they have had online or by phone instead of in person haven’t been of much use: 26% of these adults think these virtual interactions haven’t been useful, compared with smaller shares of those who say their personal lives changed a little bit (14%) or in a major way (11%).

At the same time, those who say their lives have changed in a major way are more likely to say each of the five technologies asked about in the survey helped a lot to keep them connected, compared with those who say their lives have changed a little or stayed about the same.

Among those who said their personal lives have changed in a major way, the shares who say text messages or group messaging apps, video calls or voice calls have helped a lot are roughly 20 points higher compared with those who say their lives stayed about the same. About half or more of those who say their personal lives have changed in a major way say text messages or group messaging apps (55%) or voice calls (49%) helped them a lot to stay connected with family and friends, and 40% say the same about video calls. 

Those who say their lives have changed in a major way are also more likely to say they now feel less close to close family members (35%) than those whose lives changed only a little (22%) or stayed about the same (9%). And about half (53%) of those with major change in this aspect of their life say their relationships with friends they know well are now less close.

The diminishing closeness of casual relationships is especially prominent for those whose personal lives COVID-19 changed profoundly – roughly seven-in-ten (69%) of adults with major change say that they now generally feel less close to casual acquaintances. By comparison, about a quarter (26%) of those whose personal lives stayed about the same say they feel less close to these acquaintances now.

40% of those who have used video calling during the pandemic feel worn out from such calls at least sometimes

As some Americans intensified their tech use and tried new online activities, there was a possibility that some might become “worn out” by this screen time – leading to a phenomenon commonly known as “Zoom fatigue” in the context of  personal  and  work-related  video calls. Some  accounts of the pandemic  also raised the question of whether Americans would try to purposefully “unplug” or otherwise manage their screen time, as many children and adults alike spent more time on their devices. 

Overall, among those who have used video calling during the pandemic, four-in-ten say they have often (13%) or sometimes (27%) felt worn out or fatigued from spending time on these calls. Looking at the population overall, one-third of all adults say that they feel worn out or fatigued from video calls often (11%) or sometimes (22%).

Reported fatigue increases with greater time spent on video calls. Fully 74% of those who have used video calling several times a day during the pandemic say this is the case at least sometimes, including 36% who say they feel worn out or fatigued often. About half or more of those who are on calls less often than this, but at least a few times a week, say the same. 

But even a portion of those who rarely use video calling report fatigue. About a quarter of those who have talked with others via video calls only every few weeks during the pandemic say they feel worn out at least sometimes.

The new survey shows that among those who’ve made video calls in the pandemic, there are differences in reported video call fatigue by age, formal educational attainment, and work-from-home status.

Among those who have made video calls, about six-in-ten of those ages 18 to 29 say they feel worn out or fatigued from these calls at least sometimes. By comparison, 21% of those 65 and older say so. And about half of those with a bachelor’s or advanced degree report feeling this way at least sometimes, compared with 31% of those with a high school diploma or less.

Among pandemic video call users who work from home all or most of the time, some 65% say they feel worn out or fatigued at least sometimes from the time they spend on video calls. (A  separate Center study  conducted in October 2020 that used a different definition of remote work and call fatigue found that about four-in-ten teleworkers who used video conferencing often were worn out by the time spent on them, compared with 63% of that group who said they were generally fine with the amount of time spent on video calls.)

As many daily activities moved online, Americans’ reactions to increased screen time were not just limited to issues related to video calling. A third of adults also say in this survey that they have tried to cut back on the amount of time they were spending with screens – specifically on the internet or their smartphone – since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak. 

Fully 49% of adults ages 18 to 29 have tried to cut back on their screen time, compared with roughly four-in-ten of those ages 30 to 49. Smaller but notable shares of those 50 to 64 (27%) and 65 and older (19%) say they’ve tried cutting down. 

And Americans who use social media are more likely to say they’ve tried to cut back on screen time than those who don’t – an 8 percentage point gap.

Screen time issues also became  paramount for families and children  during the pandemic. The  next chapter  of this report discusses parents’ views on their children’s screen time, alongside other findings on the experiences of parents and children during the pandemic.

• In October 2020, a  separate Center study  also asked about work and video calling. The estimates in this report should not be interpreted as changing over time due to the different sets of individuals asked the question in the two surveys and because the questions in each survey had different wording. ↩

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Science News

How the internet will change the world — even more.

By Lee Rainie

March 26, 2010 at 1:55 pm

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Recently, 895 Web experts and users were asked by the Pew Research Center and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University in North Carolina to assess predictions about technology and its effects on society in the year 2020. Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington, D.C., discussed the survey’s findings with Science News contributing correspondent Susan Gaidos.

This is your fourth “Future of the Internet” survey. Are there any themes that have come through all of the surveys?

There’s a broad feeling among technologists that technology itself is going to improve, come what may. That computing power, bandwidth, storage capacity, even our ability to pack pixels into screens, is going to keep improving.

At the same time, there is worry that humans and their institutions will not adapt as well as they might under these circumstances. We’re slow to adjust, and the technologies themselves are introducing so many new elements to life that people will potentially have a hard time adjusting to that. There’s a sense that people are marching not necessarily blindly, but certainly without full knowledge, into a future that they don’t fully know. They’re thrilled with their gadgets but they don’t know what their gadgets are doing to them.

In this era of social media, how will privacy and anonymity be maintained?

Anonymity will be harder to maintain. There are too many threats that are posed by people being allowed to do anything they want without any level of accountability or authentication. There will still be chances for anonymous encounters, but they will be in special environments in special ways.

We’re in an environment now where lots of personal sharing is going on. The experts anticipate that a new sensibility would emerge called “reputation management.” There will be tools that allow people to erase all the goofy things that they did in college, if they want to. People will be able to essentially crowd out bad information about themselves by getting better information out there and making it more prominent, more linked to or more easily findable.

The majority of experts agreed that by 2020, people’s use of the Internet will enhance human intelligence. How so?

The Web is shifting the needs that we have in our lives and the functions that we can perform, so there will be some cognitive shifting that goes on. We don’t have to remember as much stuff, for example, so there might be a shift in cognitive abilities over time from less memorization and storage. New literacies will be required such as screen literacy. Reading, writing, arithmetic and retrieval will become key, as people who can find [information] fastest and make sense of it will be at a marked advantage over those who struggle to find information and have less capacity to synthesize and organize this wealth of data that we have.

In what other realms of life did people anticipate improvements?

There’s almost a uniform feeling that health care will get better. Mobile technology and wearable devices will be able to give real-time feedback about people’s health status.  That will potentially be a life-changing event for the chronically ill or for people who have to manage their care in a deliberate way. That the capacity to interact with a doctor — either through devices or through communications that don’t involve office visits — will improve interactions and empower people in important new ways to be managers of their own health care.

The education story is a different one. There’s hope that education will change, but some despair that it’s not changing fast enough. Kids are still being taught largely in the same format and environment that their great-grandparents were — with students of the same age sitting in a classroom riveted on the all-knowing teacher.

Technologists think that that model will break down at some point and a very different set of activities will define formal education. It won’t necessarily be people of the same age, they won’t necessarily be in the same place. What will organize them is their proficiency in a subject and their interest in a subject.

There’s also hope invested in e-government and civic activity. People have new ways to engage with each other and their leaders about social activity, and to engage with the governmental agencies that are entrusted to act in those areas. The technology community has high hopes that these tools will be deployed in more interesting and exciting new ways so that we’ll see more government data and will be able to make smarter policies because of that.

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4 ways the web has changed our lives – and will shape our future

Today, half the world's population is online, half of us are younger then the web - and the revolution has only just begun Image:  REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker

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Stay up to date:, internet governance.

Today, we recognize and celebrate the 30th anniversary of a simple proposal.

That proposal was for an information management system . Behind this unassuming title lay a simple, powerful idea: the world wide web, a way for us to share and find information freely across all of connected humanity. History will judge, but many already feel that the paper detailing this proposal was the most significant step forwards since the printing press.

Certainly, as we stop to reflect on how our lives have changed and what is to come, it is hard to escape the thought that we are just at the beginning of a transformation of society that is having - and will have -both broad and deep implications. It is also clear that divergent futures lie open before us – and it is not yet clear which path we will go down.

The web has already started to change the world around us - and how we shape the web today will shape our lives.

In December 2018 we marked another milestone. It was officially recorded that for the first time, 50% of the world’s population is now connected to the internet – the ‘50/50 moment’ . Whether you feel that this is a great achievement or slow progress, it means that all of the innovation and change that we see across our lives today is a result of just a fraction of the world being online – and not for very long. More will come, and likely the pace of innovation will only increase.

But it also means that many people are not part of this transformation. They cannot enjoy the benefits nor can they be the next entrepreneur bringing new benefits to others. Furthermore, as access growth rates are slowing and the penetration of digital technologies into the fabric of mainstream economic activity globally continues at pace, we risk dramatically increasing the barriers preventing large swathes of the world from meaningfully participating in the 21st century.

The potential exists for all knowledge to be freely available to anyone in the world. The risk is that we create a two-speed society (globally and nationally) and inter-generational exclusion.

The internet is also transforming our values. The classic ‘ no-one knows you’re a dog on the internet ’ meme was soon reversed. Today, we seem to be caught in a double bind with regards to our own privacy online. High-profile cases like Cambridge Analytica make us worry that powerful organizations, private and public, have all possible information on us and use it in ways we cannot comprehend. Too often this leads to a kind of digital fatalism, and we give up trying to protect ourselves. However, stories of state-sponsored micro-targeting and big brother capabilities erode our trust not only in online services, but in public institutions at large. So digital fatalism spreads, and begins to erode trust in democratic institutions themselves.

For a while, it was clever to claim that privacy is dead – ‘just look at the young people’. And yet, the apps and services that are most popular with young people are those that protect their identities, allow at least some form of pseudonymity and don’t retain historical information. We are seeing an explosion of technologies, products and initiatives that aim to empower individuals with real choice. Real choice beyond surrendering privacy, agency or the service you want to access. Not least is the initiative on which Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor we are celebrating today, spends his time: Solid , a way for each of us to have our own ‘pod’ which contains and allows us to manage all of our own personal data.

It is all too easy to think of the web or the internet as being some virtual place, separate and distinct from the real world. However, we already know that this is not true. The internet has material impact on our real world wellbeing, both for good and bad. On the one hand, the internet can enable elderly people to be supported and monitored in their own homes, improving their quality of life. It can support professionals in high-risk environments with automation or improved intelligence to save lives. The emergence of a new communications standard, 5G, with reduced ‘latency’ will enable real-time remote control in situations never possible before, such as remote surgery or control of research equipment around delicate coral-reefs.

But we are also seeing the real-world impacts that can occur when things go wrong online, whether by accident or by design. Identity theft and child safety are topics with which most of us are familiar. However, we are becoming aware of greater risks and potential risks that are emerging. An estimated 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet over the coming years. These are fridges, cars, drones, planes, oil pipeline valves, teddy bears… everything we can imagine. The boundary between the physical and digital will continue to blur.

Even closer to home, digital exposure and addiction is being increasingly recognized as a legitimate concern – and not just for children or teenagers, but for all of us. Many are questioning the compulsion that we feel to be constantly online, checking and rechecking our feeds. This is not entirely an accident. The ‘attention economy’ has led designers to actively create products that leverage human bias and psychology to get humans to pay attention to something. Digital minimalism is the Marie Kondo of the online world. (Literally – the Amazon page for Digital Minimalism minimalistically suggests one book only – Marie Kondo’s .)

Arguably, the most important impact that the internet and the world wide web will have is the effect it is having on how we see the world – and the effect this will have on how we design solutions to our shared problems. By making information available across peer networks, traditional hierarchical structures are often rendered obsolete. Think of how the first peer-to-peer music-sharing sites swept aside traditional music businesses like Sony Music in such a short space of time (this story and others are neatly told in The Starfish and the Spider ). The web is distributed and leaderless – and yet has continued to grow and evolve over 30 years to touch half of the planet.

As humans, we constantly search for new and better ways to understand the world around us. There is a rich history of using our newest technologies as lenses to see anew the natural and social systems around us. When clocks were invented, there was no shortage of expositions, essays and analogies using clockwork as a way of better explaining all sorts of phenomena. The human body operating as clockwork was a particular topic of fascination. Some of these analogies may read simplistic or even comical to the modern reader, but others have broadly influenced how we perceive the world still today. Think Isaac Newton and the clockwork universe. We still talk about our body clocks. A high-performance organization functions like clockwork. It is baked into how we see the world and it gives us a mental template for designing solutions.

Have you read?

The web is 30 years old. what better time to fight for its future, the world wide web is 30. here are 8 things you should know about it, 3 dark trends that could destroy the web - tim berners-lee.

The web helps us all see the idea that leaderless, distributed, non-hierarchical social systems that can self-organize, persist through time and deliver positive outcomes are not only possible, but in fact may be quite common. We understand that ants or birds can act in concert for greater collective benefit on the basis of some simple rules of the road (protocols, in web-speak) that each individual follows. We can start to see the power of such a model for social organization, for movements, and for collaborating towards shared societal goals.

As the web turns 30, we might also take note of another 50/50 moment. Today, 50% of the world’s population is under the age of 30. This means that more of the world’s population have been born into a world with the web than not.

In South Africa, the children born after the end of apartheid are called the Born-Free. The world they grew up in was very different to the world of those before them.

As a greater and greater proportion of minds are born into a world which operates as much in networks as hierarchies and as much in decentralized structures and centralized authority – how will this influence how we see the world and how we organize ourselves in society?

We cannot tell. But it will certainly be coloured differently if we have shaped a web that is inclusive, trusted and safe than if we have not. Which world do we want our young minds to grow up in?

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The internet: History, evolution and how it works

The Internet is a massive computer network that has revolutionized communication and changed the world forever.

What is the internet?

• Internet invention
• How it works

How do websites work?

• Speed and bandwidth

Additional resources

Bibliography.

The internet is a vast network that connects computers across the world via more than 750,000 miles (1,200,000 kilometres) of cable running under land and sea, according to the University of Colorado Boulder. 

It is the world's fastest method of communication, making it possible to send data from London, U.K. to Sydney, Australia in just 250 milliseconds, for example. Constructing and maintaining the internet has been a monumental feat of ingenuity.

The internet is a giant computer network, linking billions of machines together by underground and underwater fibre-optic cables.These cables run connect continents and islands , everywhere except Antarctica

Each cable contains strands of glass that transmit data as pulses of light, according to the journal Science . Those strands are wrapped in layers of insulation and buried beneath the sea floor by ships carrying specialist ploughs. This helps to protect them from everything from corrosion to shark bites.

When you use it, your computer or device sends messages via these cables asking to access data stored on other machines. When accessing the internet, most people will be using the world wide web. 

When was the internet invented?

It was originally created by the U.S. government during the Cold War . In 1958, President Eisenhower founded the Advanced Research Projects Agency ( ARPA ) to give a boost to the country’s military technology, according to the Journal of Cyber Policy . Scientists and engineers developed a network of linked computers called ARPANET. 

- The Internet of Things: A seamless network of everyday objects

- What is cyberwarfare?

- Internet history timeline: ARPANET to the World Wide Web

ARPANET's original aim was to link two computers in different places, enabling them to share data. That dream became a reality in 1969, according to Historian Jeremy Norman . In the years that followed, the team linked dozens of computers together and, by the end of the 1980s, the network contained more than 30,000 machines, according to the U.K.'s Science and Media Museum .

How the onternet works

Most computers connect to the internet without the use of wires, using   Wi-Fi , via a physical modem. It connects via a wire to a socket in the wall, which links to a box outside. That box connects via still more wires to a network of cables under the ground. Together, they convert radio waves to electrical signals to fibre optic pulses, and back again. 

At every connection point in the underground network, there are junction boxes called routers. Their job is to work out the best way to pass data from your computer to the computer with which you’re trying to connect. According to the IEEE International Conference on Communications , they use your IP addresses to work out where the data should go. Latency is the technical word that describes how long it takes data to get from one place to another, according to Frontier . 

Each router is only connected to its local network. If a message arrives for a computer that the router doesn’t recognizse, it passes it on to a router higher up in the local network. They each maintain an address book called a routing table . According to the Internet Protocol Journal , it shows the paths through the network to all the local IP addresses. 

The internet sends data around the world, across land and sea, as displayed on the Submarine Cable Map . The data passes between networks until it reaches the one closest to its destination. Then, it passes through local routers until it arrives at the computer with the matching IP address.

The internet relies upon the two connecting computers  speaking the same digital language. To achieve this, there is a set of rules called the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), according to the web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare . 

TCP/IP makes the internet work a bit like a postal system. There is an address book that contains the identity of every device on the network, and a set of standard envelopes for packaging up data. The envelopes must carry the address of the sender, the address of the recipient, and details about the information packed inside. The IP, explains how the address system works, whileTCP, how to package and send the data.

Click the numbers on the following interactive image to find out what happens when you type www.livescience.com into your browser:

Internet speed and bandwidth

When it comes to internet speed how much data you can download in one second: bandwidth. According to Tom’s Guide , to surf the web, check your email, and update your social media, 25 megabits per second is enough. But, if you want to watch 4K movies, live stream video, or play online multiplayer games, you might need speeds of up to 100-200 megabits per second.

Your download speed depends on one main factor: the quality of the underground cables that link you to the rest of the world. Fibre optic cables send data much faster than their copper counterparts, according to the cable testing company BASEC , and your home internet is limited by the infrastructure available in your area.

Jersey has the highest average bandwidth in the world, according to Cable.co.uk . The little British island off the coast of France boasts average download speeds of over 274 megabits per second. Turkmenistan has the lowest, with download speeds barely reaching 0.5 megabits per second.

You can read more about the history of the internet at the Internet Society website . To discover how the Internet has changed our daily lives, read this article by Computing Australia .

• " Getting to the bottom of the internet’s carbon footprint ". University of Colorado Boulder, College of Media, Communication and Information (2021).
• " The evolution of the Internet: from military experiment to General Purpose Technology ". Journal of Cyber Policy (2016). 
• " The Internet: Past, Present, and Future ". Educational Technology (1997). 
• " Three-Way Handshake ". CISSP Study Guide (Second Edition) (2012).
• " Content Routers: Fetching Data on Network Path ". IEEE International Conference on Communications (2011).
• " Analyzing the Internet's BGP Routing Table ". The Internet Protocol Journal (2001). 
• " The Internet of Tomorrow ". Science (1999).

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Laura Mears is a biologist who left the confines of the lab for the rigours of an office desk as a keen science writer and a full-time software engineer. Laura has previously written for the magazines How It Works and T3 .  Laura's main interests include science, technology and video games.

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Forty years of the internet: how the world changed for ever

T owards the end of the summer of 1969 – a few weeks after the moon landings, a few days after Woodstock, and a month before the first broadcast of Monty Python's Flying Circus – a large grey metal box was delivered to the office of Leonard Kleinrock, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. It was the same size and shape as a household refrigerator, and outwardly, at least, it had about as much charm. But Kleinrock was thrilled: a photograph from the time shows him standing beside it, in requisite late-60s brown tie and brown trousers, beaming like a proud father.

Had he tried to explain his excitement to anyone but his closest colleagues, they probably wouldn't have understood. The few outsiders who knew of the box's existence couldn't even get its name right: it was an IMP, or "interface message processor", but the year before, when a Boston company had won the contract to build it, its local senator, Ted Kennedy, sent a telegram praising its ecumenical spirit in creating the first "interfaith message processor". Needless to say, though, the box that arrived outside Kleinrock's office wasn't a machine capable of fostering understanding among the great religions of the world. It was much more important than that.

It's impossible to say for certain when the internet began, mainly because nobody can agree on what, precisely, the internet is. (This is only partly a philosophical question: it is also a matter of egos, since several of the people who made key contributions are anxious to claim the credit.) But 29 October 1969 – 40 years ago next week – has a strong claim for being, as Kleinrock puts it today, "the day the infant internet uttered its first words". At 10.30pm, as Kleinrock's fellow professors and students crowded around, a computer was connected to the IMP, which made contact with a second IMP, attached to a second computer, several hundred miles away at the Stanford Research Institute, and an undergraduate named Charley Kline tapped out a message. Samuel Morse, sending the first telegraph message 125 years previously, chose the portentous phrase: "What hath God wrought?" But Kline's task was to log in remotely from LA to the Stanford machine, and there was no opportunity for portentousness: his instructions were to type the command LOGIN.

To say that the rest is history is the emptiest of cliches – but trying to express the magnitude of what began that day, and what has happened in the decades since, is an undertaking that quickly exposes the limits of language. It's interesting to compare how much has changed in computing and the internet since 1969 with, say, how much has changed in world politics. Consider even the briefest summary of how much has happened on the global stage since 1969: the Vietnam war ended; the cold war escalated then declined; the Berlin Wall fell; communism collapsed; Islamic fundamentalism surged. And yet nothing has quite the power to make people in their 30s, 40s or 50s feel very old indeed as reflecting upon the growth of the internet and the world wide web. Twelve years after Charley Kline's first message on the Arpanet, as it was then known, there were still only 213 computers on the network; but 14 years after that, 16 million people were online, and email was beginning to change the world; the first really usable web browser wasn't launched until 1993, but by 1995 we had Amazon, by 1998 Google, and by 2001, Wikipedia, at which point there were 513 million people online. Today the figure is more like 1.7 billion.

Unless you are 15 years old or younger, you have lived through the dotcom bubble and bust, the birth of Friends Reunited and Craigslist and eBay and Facebook and Twitter, blogging, the browser wars, Google Earth, filesharing controversies, the transformation of the record industry, political campaigning, activism and campaigning, the media, publishing, consumer banking, the pornography industry, travel agencies, dating and retail; and unless you're a specialist, you've probably only been following the most attention-grabbing developments. Here's one of countless statistics that are liable to induce feelings akin to vertigo: on New Year's Day 1994 – only yesterday, in other words – there were an estimated 623 websites. In total. On the whole internet. "This isn't a matter of ego or crowing," says Steve Crocker, who was present that day at UCLA in 1969, "but there has not been, in the entire history of mankind, anything that has changed so dramatically as computer communications, in terms of the rate of change."

Looking back now, Kleinrock and Crocker are both struck by how, as young computer scientists, they were simultaneously aware that they were involved in something momentous and, at the same time, merely addressing a fairly mundane technical problem. On the one hand, they were there because of the Russian Sputnik satellite launch, in 1957, which panicked the American defence establishment, prompting Eisenhower to channel millions of dollars into scientific research, and establishing Arpa, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to try to win the arms technology race. The idea was "that we would not get surprised again," said Robert Taylor, the Arpa scientist who secured the money for the Arpanet, persuading the agency's head to give him a million dollars that had been earmarked for ballistic missile research. With another pioneer of the early internet, JCR Licklider, Taylor co-wrote the paper, "The Computer As A Communication Device", which hinted at what was to come. "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face," they declared. "That is rather a startling thing to say, but it is our conclusion."

On the other hand, the breakthrough accomplished that night in 1969 was a decidedly down-to-earth one. The Arpanet was not, in itself, intended as some kind of secret weapon to put the Soviets in their place: it was simply a way to enable researchers to access computers remotely, because computers were still vast and expensive, and the scientists needed a way to share resources. (The notion that the network was designed so that it would survive a nuclear attack is an urban myth, though some of those involved sometimes used that argument to obtain funding.) The technical problem solved by the IMPs wasn't very exciting, either. It was already possible to link computers by telephone lines, but it was glacially slow, and every computer in the network had to be connected, by a dedicated line, to every other computer, which meant you couldn't connect more than a handful of machines without everything becoming monstrously complex and costly. The solution, called "packet switching" – which owed its existence to the work of a British physicist, Donald Davies – involved breaking data down into blocks that could be routed around any part of the network that happened to be free, before getting reassembled at the other end.

"I thought this was important, but I didn't really think it was as challenging as what I thought of as the 'real research'," says Crocker, a genial Californian, now 65, who went on to play a key role in the expansion of the internet. "I was particularly fascinated, in those days, by artificial intelligence, and by trying to understand how people think. I thought that was a much more substantial and respectable research topic than merely connecting up a few machines. That was certainly useful, but it wasn't art."

Still, Kleinrock recalls a tangible sense of excitement that night as Kline sat down at the SDS Sigma 7 computer, connected to the IMP, and at the same time made telephone contact with his opposite number at Stanford. As his colleagues watched, he typed the letter L, to begin the word LOGIN.

"Have you got the L?" he asked, down the phone line. "Got the L," the voice at Stanford responded.

Kline typed an O. "Have you got the O?"

"Got the O," Stanford replied.

Kline typed a G, at which point the system crashed, and the connection was lost. The G didn't make it through, which meant that, quite by accident, the first message ever transmitted across the nascent internet turned out, after all, to be fittingly biblical:

"LO."

Frenzied visions of a global conscious brain

One of the most intriguing things about the growth of the internet is this: to a select group of technological thinkers, the surprise wasn't how quickly it spread across the world, remaking business, culture and politics – but that it took so long to get off the ground. Even when computers were mainly run on punch-cards and paper tape, there were whispers that it was inevitable that they would one day work collectively, in a network, rather than individually. (Tracing the origins of online culture even further back is some people's idea of an entertaining game: there are those who will tell you that the Talmud, the book of Jewish law, contains a form of hypertext, the linking-and-clicking structure at the heart of the web.) In 1945, the American presidential science adviser, Vannevar Bush, was already imagining the "memex", a device in which "an individual stores all his books, records, and communications", which would be linked to each other by "a mesh of associative trails", like weblinks. Others had frenzied visions of the world's machines turning into a kind of conscious brain. And in 1946, an astonishingly complete vision of the future appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. In a story entitled A Logic Named Joe, the author Murray Leinster envisioned a world in which every home was equipped with a tabletop box that he called a "logic":

"You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get . . . you punch 'Sally Hancock's Phone' an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast [or] who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration . . . that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation . . . hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country . . . The only thing it won't do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, 'Oh, you think so, do you?' in that peculiar kinda voice "

Despite all these predictions, though, the arrival of the internet in the shape we know it today was never a matter of inevitability. It was a crucial idiosyncracy of the Arpanet that its funding came from the American defence establishment – but that the millions ended up on university campuses, with researchers who embraced an anti-establishment ethic, and who in many cases were committedly leftwing; one computer scientist took great pleasure in wearing an anti-Vietnam badge to a briefing at the Pentagon. Instead of smothering their research in the utmost secrecy – as you might expect of a cold war project aimed at winning a technological battle against Moscow – they made public every step of their thinking, in documents known as Requests For Comments.

Deliberately or not, they helped encourage a vibrant culture of hobbyists on the fringes of academia – students and rank amateurs who built their own electronic bulletin-board systems and eventually FidoNet, a network to connect them to each other. An argument can be made that these unofficial tinkerings did as much to create the public internet as did the Arpanet. Well into the 90s, by the time the Arpanet had been replaced by NSFNet, a larger government-funded network, it was still the official position that only academic researchers, and those affiliated to them, were supposed to use the network. It was the hobbyists, making unofficial connections into the main system, who first opened the internet up to allcomers.

What made all of this possible, on a technical level, was simultaneously the dullest-sounding and most crucial development since Kleinrock's first message. This was the software known as TCP/IP, which made it possible for networks to connect to other networks, creating a "network of networks", capable of expanding virtually infinitely – which is another way of defining what the internet is. It's for this reason that the inventors of TCP/IP, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, are contenders for the title of fathers of the internet, although Kleinrock, understandably, disagrees. "Let me use an analogy," he says. "You would certainly not credit the birth of aviation to the invention of the jet engine. The Wright Brothers launched aviation. Jet engines greatly improved things."

The spread of the internet across the Atlantic, through academia and eventually to the public, is a tale too intricate to recount here, though it bears mentioning that British Telecom and the British government didn't really want the internet at all: along with other European governments, they were in favour of a different networking technology, Open Systems Interconnect. Nevertheless, by July 1992, an Essex-born businessman named Cliff Stanford had opened Demon Internet , Britain's first commercial internet service provider. Officially, the public still wasn't meant to be connecting to the internet. "But it was never a real problem," Stanford says today. "The people trying to enforce that weren't working very hard to make it happen, and the people working to do the opposite were working much harder." The French consulate in London was an early customer, paying Demon £10 a month instead of thousands of pounds to lease a private line to Paris from BT.

After a year or so, Demon had between 2,000 and 3,000 users, but they weren't always clear why they had signed up: it was as if they had sensed the direction of the future, in some inchoate fashion, but hadn't thought things through any further than that. "The question we always got was: 'OK, I'm connected – what do I do now?'" Stanford recalls. "It was one of the most common questions on our support line. We would answer with 'Well, what do you want to do? Do you want to send an email?' 'Well, I don't know anyone with an email address.' People got connected, but they didn't know what was meant to happen next."

Fortunately, a couple of years previously, a British scientist based at Cern, the physics laboratory outside Geneva, had begun to answer that question, and by 1993 his answer was beginning to be known to the general public. What happened next was the web.

The birth of the web

I sent my first email in 1994, not long after arriving at university, from a small, under-ventilated computer room that smelt strongly of sweat. Email had been in existence for decades by then – the @ symbol was introduced in 1971, and the first message, according to the programmer who sent it, Ray Tomlinson, was "something like QWERTYUIOP". (The test messages, Tomlinson has said, "were entirely forgettable, and I have, therefore, forgotten them".) But according to an unscientific poll of friends, family and colleagues, 1994 seems fairly typical: I was neither an early adopter nor a late one. A couple of years later I got my first mobile phone, which came with two batteries: a very large one, for normal use, and an extremely large one, for those occasions on which you might actually want a few hours of power. By the time I arrived at the Guardian, email was in use, but only as an add-on to the internal messaging system, operated via chunky beige terminals with green-on-black screens. It took for ever to find the @ symbol on the keyboard, and I don't remember anything like an inbox, a sent-mail folder, or attachments. I am 34 years old, but sometimes I feel like Methuselah.

I have no recollection of when I first used the world wide web, though it was almost certainly when people still called it the world wide web, or even W3, perhaps in the same breath as the phrase "information superhighway", made popular by Al Gore. (Or "infobahn": did any of us really, ever, call the internet the "infobahn"?) For most of us, though, the web is in effect synonymous with the internet, even if we grasp that in technical terms that's inaccurate: the web is simply a system that sits on top of the internet, making it greatly easier to navigate the information there, and to use it as a medium of sharing and communication. But the distinction rarely seems relevant in everyday life now, which is why its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, has his own legitimate claim to be the progenitor of the internet as we know it. The first ever website was his own, at CERN: info.cern.ch.

The idea that a network of computers might enable a specific new way of thinking about information, instead of just allowing people to access the data on each other's terminals, had been around for as long as the idea of the network itself: it's there in Vannevar Bush's memex, and Murray Leinster's logics. But the grandest expression of it was Project Xanadu, launched in 1960 by the American philosopher Ted Nelson, who imagined – and started to build – a vast repository for every piece of writing in existence, with everything connected to everything else according to a principle he called "transclusion". It was also, presciently, intended as a method for handling many of the problems that would come to plague the media in the age of the internet, automatically channelling small royalties back to the authors of anything that was linked. Xanadu was a mind-spinning vision – and at least according to an unflattering portrayal by Wired magazine in 1995, over which Nelson threatened to sue, led those attempting to create it into a rabbit-hole of confusion, backbiting and "heart-slashing despair". Nelson continues to develop Xanadu today, arguing that it is a vastly superior alternative to the web. "WE FIGHT ON," the Xanadu website declares, sounding rather beleaguered, not least since the declaration is made on a website.

Web browsers crossed the border into mainstream use far more rapidly than had been the case with the internet itself: Mosaic launched in 1993 and Netscape followed soon after, though it was an embarrassingly long time before Microsoft realised the commercial necessity of getting involved at all. Amazon and eBay were online by 1995. And in 1998 came Google, offering a powerful new way to search the proliferating mass of information on the web. Until not too long before Google, it had been common for search or directory websites to boast about how much of the web's information they had indexed – the relic of a brief period, hilarious in hindsight, when a user might genuinely have hoped to check all the webpages that mentioned a given subject. Google, and others, saw that the key to the web's future would be helping users exclude almost everything on any given topic, restricting search results to the most relevant pages.

Without most of us quite noticing when it happened, the web went from being a strange new curiosity to a background condition of everyday life: I have no memory of there being an intermediate stage, when, say, half the information I needed on a particular topic could be found online, while the other half still required visits to libraries. "I remember the first time I saw a web address on the side of a truck, and I thought, huh, OK, something's happening here," says Spike Ilacqua, who years beforehand had helped found The World, the first commercial internet service provider in the US. Finally, he stopped telling acquaintances that he worked in "computers", and started to say that he worked on "the internet", and nobody thought that was strange.

It is absurd – though also unavoidable here – to compact the whole of what happened from then onwards into a few sentences: the dotcom boom, the historically unprecedented dotcom bust, the growing "digital divide", and then the hugely significant flourishing, over the last seven years, of what became known as Web 2.0. It is only this latter period that has revealed the true capacity of the web for "generativity", for the publishing of blogs by anyone who could type, for podcasting and video-sharing, for the undermining of totalitarian regimes, for the use of sites such as Twitter and Facebook to create (and ruin) friendships, spread fashions and rumours, or organise political resistance. But you almost certainly know all this: it's part of what these days, in many parts of the world, we call "just being alive".

The most confounding thing of all is that in a few years' time, all this stupendous change will probably seem like not very much change at all. As Crocker points out, when you're dealing with exponential growth, the distance from A to B looks huge until you get to point C, whereupon the distance between A and B looks like almost nothing; when you get to point D, the distance between B and C looks similarly tiny. One day, presumably, everything that has happened in the last 40 years will look like early throat-clearings — mere preparations for whatever the internet is destined to become. We will be the equivalents of the late-60s computer engineers, in their horn-rimmed glasses, brown suits, and brown ties, strange, period-costume characters populating some dimly remembered past.

Will you remember when the web was something you accessed primarily via a computer? Will you remember when there were places you couldn't get a wireless connection? Will you remember when "being on the web" was still a distinct concept, something that described only a part of your life, instead of permeating all of it? Will you remember Google?

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How is the internet changing the way we behave?

The internet has changed the world around us, but forensic cyberpsychologist Dr Mary Aiken argues it is changing far more than that, it is shaping our development, behaviour and societal norms.

As social networks like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram absorb our time and our attention, Dr Mary Aiken - a leading expert in forensic cyberpsychology - explores in her new book The Cyber Effect how the internet is shaping our perception of the world around us, examining what effect this will have on our children’s development, our ability to form new relationships and how much we are willing to share with the world.

Cyberbabies

How many times have you seen a baby in a pushchair clutching a smartphone? Or a toddler tethered in a restaurant baby chair furiously swiping an iPad? These cyberbabies are clearly absorbed by their virtual pacifiers – but has anybody stopped to think about the impact of technology on the developing infant?

The American Academy of Paediatrics recommends no screen time for children under 18 months (with the exception of video calls). That’s no TV for babies, no apps with funny cartoons on a parent’s or babysitter’s mobile phone, and no animated Disney Movies on an ipad. There is a modern perception (or misconception) that young children need to be kept busy and occupied at all times. Somewhere along the line, a misinterpretation of neuroscience has led parents to believe that all stimulation for a child is good stimulation. They believe, wrongly, that a young brain must be kept constantly challenged and engaged. It’s as if parents fear their toddler will become bored with real life, which I guess means life without a screen.

Young children’s behaviour is changing, British teachers are reporting an escalation of problems associated with pervasive tablet use among preschool-age children including developmental delays in attention span, fine motor skills, dexterity, speaking, and socialisation, as well as an increase in aggressive and antisocial behaviour, obesity, and tiredness. My advice: pay attention to the guidelines - put away the devices until your child is old enough for them.

Making friends in cyberspace

The number of social contacts or “casual friends” with whom an average individual can handle and maintain stable social relationships is around 150, known as Dunbar’s number . This number is consistent throughout human history, and is the size of the modern hunter-gatherer societies, the size of most military companies, most industrial divisions, most Christmas card lists (in Britain, anyway), and most wedding parties. Anything much beyond Dunbar’s number is too complicated to handle at optimal processing levels.

Now imagine the child who has a Facebook page and an Instagram account, who participates on Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Twitter. Throw into that mix all the mobile phone, email, and text contacts. A child who is active online, and interested in social media, could potentially have thousands of contacts. We are not talking about an intimate group of friends. We are talking about an army.
 And who’s in this army? These aren’t friends in any real-world sense.

They don’t really know and care about you. They are online contacts, their identity and age and name potentially false. According to Dunbar, if children have grown up spending most of their social time online with thousands of these “friends,” they may not get enough real-world experience in handling social groups of any size, but particularly on a large scale, rendering them even less able to cope with real-world crowds. In other words, spending more time on social media can render children less competent socially, not more.

Me, my selfie and I

In the age of technology, identity appears to be increasingly developed through the gateway of a different self, a less tangible one, a digital creation.

Let’s call this “the cyber self”, or who you are in a digital context. This is the idealised self, the person you wish to be. It is a potential new you that now manifests in a new environment, cyberspace. To an increasing extent, it is the virtual self that today’s teenager is busy assembling, creating, and experimenting with. Each year, as technology becomes a more dominant factor in the lives of teens, the cyber self is what interacts with others, needs a bigger time investment, and has the promise of becoming super popular, or an overnight viral celebrity. The selfie is the frontline cyber self, a highly manipulated artifact that has been created and curated for public consumption.

In behavioural terms how do we explain that weird, vacant, unmistakable expression on the faces of many selfie subjects? The eyes look out but the mind is elsewhere.

The virtual looking glass could be socially isolating, except for one thing. The selfie can’t exist in a vacuum. The selfie needs feedback. A cyberpsychologist might say that’s the whole point of a selfie. Selfies ask a question of their audience: Like me like this?

The Privacy Paradox

The privacy paradox was first introduced by Professor Susan B. Barnes to demonstrate how teenagers exhibit a lack of concern about their privacy online. It’s an interesting shift because so often in the real world, many teens are self-conscious and tend to seek privacy. But online, something else happens - their behaviour changes. Even teenagers who are well versed in the dangers and have read stories of identity theft, sextortion, cyberbullying, cybercrimes, and worse continue to share as though there is no risk.

In 2005, when the Facebook accounts of 4,000 students were studied, it was discovered that only a small percentage had changed the default privacy settings. A more recent study , shows that now almost 55 percent of teenagers have adjusted their Facebook settings to restrict total strangers from viewing their content. While that shows a change to greater concern about privacy, it still is too low a number.

The explanation is lack of interest - teenagers simply don’t care. 
Why? 
Because privacy is a generational construct. It means one thing to baby boomers, something else to millennials, and a completely different thing to today’s teenagers. So when we talk about “privacy” concerns on the internet, it would be helpful if we were talking about the same thing - but we aren’t.

But just because teenagers don’t have the same concerns about privacy as their parents and don’t care who knows their age, religion, location, or shopping habits, it doesn’t mean they don’t pay attention to who is seeing their posts and pictures. Teens actively adjust what they present online depending on the audience they want to impress. Everything is calibrated for a specific purpose - to look cool, or tough, or hot.

In other words, when it suits them, teenagers can be enormously savvy about how to protect the things they want kept private, mostly from their parents. Ian Miller, who studies the psychology of online sharing sums it up as follows : “the kind of privacy adolescents want is the same kind of privacy that they have always wanted… they don’t care if Facebook knows their religion, but they do care if their parents find out about their sex life.”

Cyber selection

Nothing in recent years has proven the power of appearance more than the success of the dating app Tinder, which for young adults puts the two most important mating selection factors together quickly and brilliantly - proximity and attractiveness. On Tinder, you adjust your settings to find prospects in a proximal range that makes sense for you. Based on your location, photographs of prospects are provided. If you like a picture you see, you swipe right to learn more.

Tinder claims to have generated 9 billion matches, more than the human population on Earth, which suggests that either the whole world is using the dating app or some people are just really, really active. The stats are impressive: 196 countries, 1.4 billion swipes per day, 26 million matches per day. From a behavioural point of view, the process of swiping right for approval, and learning that your own image has been swiped right by someone else, has been described as “addictive” and even rewarding on a neurological level.

Are we moving toward an era when technology-mediated relationships will be ephemeral, lasting only as long as a swipe? If the swiping behaviour is actually what young adults find neurologically rewarding, it may be that they enjoy that more than actually finding a mate, or love. Some surveys suggest that face-to-face encounters between individuals, romantic or otherwise, are steadily on the decline. We may be moving from natural selection to cyber selection.

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How Has The Internet Changed Our Lives (Essay/Paper Sample)

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How has the internet changed our lives

For years, technology has been an amazing resource, with advanced technology, significant discoveries have been made significant changes in our lives. The internet has turned our lives upside down revolutionizing every aspect of our lives to the extent that it has become a lifestyle. In everything, we do we need the internet to make tasks easier. The Internet has changed the way we carry work and interact with people. People tend to spend more time online performing different tasks, several health problems are associated with the internet. Many people are increasingly experiencing eyesight problems and back problems because of sitting for longer periods using the internet. The changes witnessed in social communication are significant, even though people use analog tools in some sectors, new technology is gaining ground every day transforming all sectors. The internet has removed all communication barriers.

The internet has taken away our personal freedom because of the internet, we know everything about everyone at any given moment. With the increasing number of people using the internet, people personal freedom is limited. The key concern about the Internet is privacy. Privacy is the top agenda, especially with the increasing use of social media. Inappropriate use of Internet platforms is becoming the hit headlines every day, including celebrities being in the limelight for posting inappropriate comments or private pictures, to criminal activities like data leakage being common features.

The Internet has significantly affected education, providing limitless possibilities for learning. Compared to other forms of communication like radio or word of mouth, the internet makes it easier to find and access information without much effort.  People can use the internet to share knowledge and develop new ways of classroom teaching and learning. Learners have become more captivated because modern strategies stimulate students’ imagination. Through networking, students are more empowered because they are actively involved in the learning. Accordingly, the internet is the key factor that drives the world economy today, it offers several possibilities of buying products online, including tickets, food and leisure products. It has also become the major distribution channel for goods and services. With the invention of the new applications, conducting business online is more secure creating new business opportunities. The e-commerce has promoted small businesses, giving them the opportunity to grow following the global trend of using online purchases.

Before the internet was invented, getting an idea to be published or reaching a larger crowd would require more resources. With the internet, ordinary people can present ideas using online platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and blogs. Allie Brosh is constantly influencing many people through her articles about her life journey. She started by writing informative posts on her blog page, with time she attracted many followers and published one of the popular books.  The internet has given ordinary people the opportunity to share their experiences instead of reserving these powers for the privileged people.

People have much freedom today, people meet, do shopping, chat with their loved ones despite the distance organize revolutions, share their life experiences, ideas and make updates because of the internet invention. There is no doubt that the internet has changed how we live altering our day-to-day life. The Internet provides numerous opportunities and benefits, different people, making it one of the essential services sought by everyone across the globe.

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Ross Douthat

Is the internet the enemy of progress.

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

It’s unusual when you find a strong dose of pessimism about the future of technological progress highlighted by one of the world’s leading techno-optimists. But if you follow the combative venture capitalist Marc Andreessen on X, you would have seen him giving wide circulation to this passage from Michael Crichton’s 1995 “Jurassic Park” sequel “The Lost World,” in which Crichton’s ever-prescient Dr. Ian Malcolm warns that the internet will put an end to human progress:

“It means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down … And everybody on Earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media — it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity — our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species … Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity.”

This is the kind of quotation I would normally highlight at the end of this newsletter, in my “This Week in Decadence” feature. But it’s 29 years old, written when the true internet era was still just a gleam in Al Gore’s eye.

And as prophecies go, it’s pretty impressive — up there with Malcolm’s rather more famous prediction about just how bad things would get in John Hammond’s amusement park. The quote doesn’t capture everything about the current age (more on the prophecy’s limits in a moment), but it predicted quite a lot: the popular styles that seem stuck on repeat ; the mid-list musicians and novelists disappearing amid the dominance of megastars; the dwindling interest in new music as the algorithm steers everyone to the Beatles; the “ age of average ” in everything from art and architecture to hotel décor , auto design and Instagram looks.

You could further argue that the passage predicted the Great Stagnation that Tyler Cowen identified in 2011, the productivity slowdown and disappointing economic growth that followed the initial 1990s-era internet boom. You could say that it predicted the remarkable ideological groupthink of the liberal Western leadership class over the same period, the rise of Davos Man and then the heightened elite conformism of the woke era. Finally, you could say that it predicted the striking phenomenon of birthrates declining globally, not just locally, in nearly every country and region touched by the iPhone version of modernity.

This last point is central to the updating of the Malcolm/Crichton thesis offered recently by the George Mason University professor Robin Hanson. Writing for Quillette, he argues that globalization and homogenization have reduced cultural competition in roughly the way that the “Lost World” passage describes. Instead of a bevy of cultural models competing the way private-sector firms do and dying off quickly if they don’t adapt successfully, globalization gives us a tendency toward “macro culture” — a few large-scale cultural models, or maybe eventually even just a global monoculture. This has initial benefits but long-term drawbacks:

The recent big jump in the size of macro cultures has boosted within -culture innovation, powering peace, trade and fast-growing wealth. As a result, our few huge cultures today suffer much less from famine, disease or war. But because of these effects, we should expect to now get much less selection of cultures, and thus less long-run innovation. It’s not just that we’re forgoing opportunities to improve our macro cultures. Selection may also be too weak — at least in the short run — to cancel the mistakes of cultural drift. Shouldn’t we expect that macro cultures, when selection is weak, will drift into dysfunction just as firm cultures do?

This kind of maladaptive cultural drift, Hanson argues, is what’s happening with below-replacement fertility. For a variety of social and economic reasons, the developed world has converged on a reproductive model that’s already leading to rapid population aging and could lead — with South Korea as the blinking-red indicator light — to outright population collapse. This all but guarantees that technological and economic progress will slow down, but Hanson goes further and argues that depopulation may turn the world over to “insular cultures like Mennonites, Amish, and Haredim,” which by “doubling every two decades,” he writes, “look on track to replace our mainline civilization in a few centuries.”

For him, this is basically a fall-of-Rome scenario, with insular religious minorities playing the role of the early Christians and the rest of us cast in the role of the decadent Roman elites. And Hanson suggests that it’s extremely difficult for a culture that’s become universal but also maladaptive to escape this kind of fate, to get back to dynamism without first going through a crackup or collapse that yields more competition in the wreckage.

Now let’s consider the alternative to this kind of pessimism. When he posted the Ian Malcolm quotation, Andreessen did not endorse it; rather, he caveated it, saying that Crichton “was right about this. But also wrong. The internet is also the land of a million shards, cultures, cults.” Meaning that while there is a powerful tendency toward cultural homogenization and global uniformity, the online era also allows for more of Hanson’s within-culture innovation, if you know where to look for it: more conformism at the center, maybe, but more ferment at the fringe; more debilitating groupthink but also more eccentricity and radical experiments.

To develop this argument, you might say that while Crichton’s character got a lot of big things right, his prophecy underestimated the human tendency to react against stagnation and decadence once it begins to set in.

So the past decade or so has delivered polarization and division as well as incurious conformism, with populist rebellions and socialist revivals and extreme-outsider ideas coming into fashion rather than everyone thinking the same thing at the same time — and these have been mediated and encouraged by the same internet that’s encouraged homogeneity.

Outside the West, there are now various explicit attempts to escape the universal politics of global liberalism — the various visions of what Bruno Maçães calls “ civilization states ” in China and India and Russia, the quest for non-Western models of 21st-century development and power. Some of these paths are grim and tyrannical, but they aren’t just seeking sameness and convergence. For good or ill, they’re aiming at the strong cultural competition that Hanson thinks we need.

Meanwhile within the Western world, America, at least, has slipped somewhat free from the Great Stagnation. For all its flaws, Silicon Valley remains an exceptional culture, the American South and West are booming, the artificial intelligence breakthroughs are real, however uncertain their consequences. There are forms of spiritual ferment ( charismatic revivals , pagan experiments, the neo-traditionalism of younger Christians) at work even as the old Christian institutions continue to decline. Even American cinema is showing a few big bright spots after its Covid-era diminishment.

If the rule of a globalized, digitally united world is maladaptive conformity, in other words, you can also see some notable exceptions — enough of them, maybe, to say that we aren’t just waiting for the Amish to take over, that Andreessen’s plethora of shards, cultures and cults will suffice to deliver renewal from within.

What makes me a bit less optimistic than the venture capitalist is my sense that it’s hard for the shards and subcultures to scale up. On the largest scale, the alternatives to the globalized macro culture often seem to be either fake or failing: Russia is a gangster state, not a civilizational alternative; China is plunging into the low-fertility future faster than the West, and so on.

But on the smaller scale, the smallness is the problem. You can have a micro culture that resists the macro culture, an exceptionalism in one town, one region, one college, one very online community, but if we aren’t going to just sink into civilizational old age, at some point this nonconformism has to break out and actually change the world. You need your weird art scenesters to reshape the movie business, your trads to build cathedrals as well as home-school co-ops, your high-fertility exceptions to retain their fecundity while adding more non-zealous normies to their ranks, your populists and radicals to actually govern effectively, not just gripe and critique. And so far, we have only scanty models of this happening.

(This issue applies to the Amish and Mennonites as well. I don’t think insular religious subcultures could take over the West the way Christians took over the Roman Empire, because their current success depends on their insularity. To exert real influence of the kind the early Christians gained, they would have to shed some of that separatism, and once they did so, they would immediately be subject to the same homogenizing forces as everyone else.)

I also worry — and this is a running disagreement I’ve had with Andreessen — that the pull of online reality and headset-mediated simulations almost automatically carries us toward a variation on the Crichton dystopia, a version of stagnation that’s sustained by the illusion of exploration, an age of fundamental conformity disguised by the personal tailoring of everyone’s private holodeck.

Andreessen often worries , and reasonably so, about how A.I. could be co-opted by a culture of conformity, deployed as a tool of ideological groupthink , the chat prompt’s minders herding everyone into the same narrow zone of speech and thought. But A.I. also seems like it could carry us more organically into a future of personalized illusions, comfortable numbness, simulated relationships and precision-guided digital addictions just as easily as into a future of A.I.-enabled artistic masterpieces, cancer cures, self-driving cars and Mars expeditions.

I think there’s hope of escape from the Crichton prophecy. But if we don’t escape, these will be the terms of our imprisonment: a wired-together environment that freezes us in place while being so perpetually stimulating and distracting that only the dropouts and the despairing notice what’s really going on.

Razib Khan on how cities make and break civilizations.

Alexandra Walsham on early modern atheism .

Michael Brendan Dougherty on the inescapable 1990s .

Josh Dzieza on the World Wide Web in the depths of the sea .

Ruxandra Teslo on a proposed cure for cavities .

Tyler Cowen interviews Peter Thiel.

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I’ll be speaking at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Fla., this coming Tuesday, April 23, at 7 p.m., on the future of the Catholic Church. The event is free and open to the public.

Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @ DouthatNYT • Facebook