On February 14, 2018, our HIST 390 class discussed the birth of the Internet and how it changed the world upon its conception.  Looking back, World War II really changed things.  The scale of the American Industrial Revolution was high and the resulting “Cold War” between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. made people fearful of the future, as the destruction of the world had suddenly become a very real possibility.  It became so serious that a huge part of U.S. research went into targeting, which means that they spent a lot of time and resources on how to properly aim bombs, shells, rockets, etc.  At first, the controls were via mechanical analogue, but over time, it was replaced by electric computers and vacuum tubes.  This would be one of the first instances of ever using the Internet, and it wouldn’t be the last.  While the Internet was, at first, limited to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) it later branched out into ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency NETwork), which would eventually be the very basis for the Internet.  As the full name of the ARPANET may suggest, the Internet was originally what researchers and intellectuals had hoped would be a platform for information sharing, basically for it to be a way for people to share information and discoveries without any “sinister” or “objective-driven” governments and organizations to get in the way.  It was their hope that, with the formation of the Internet, information would be more free, democratic, and open.  Unfortunately, the Internet presented said information in a format that would confuse even the smartest and most intellectual among them.  The Internet would introduce to many people a system that wasn’t linear, but was rather multiple choice in its execution due to the systems being reliant on punch cards.  It would appear that before the Internet became the hub of information sharing that intellectuals had hoped it would be, everyone was going to have to go through a bit of a learning curve first.

To better illustrate the multiple choice aspect of the Internet that confused so many people at the time, our professor showed the class a website that he created himself.  This website, he explained, had greatly confused so many people before because it was not as straightforward in its directions as people were used to at the time, and even when you did figure out what to do, it would lead you with at least four options, which would then lead you to many more options, with no clear path the user was supposed to take.  For example, on the site, there was a chance for the user to meet a conman, but the user would have no real way of knowing that he was a conman unless they had first visited the police station, learned how to spot a conman or found the wanted poster with the conman’s exact face on it.  Again, it was a nonlinear path with multiple possible correct paths one could take.  It didn’t matter if you started at the movie theater or started at the police station, but the consequences for your actions would still be felt if you did not do certain things beforehand or if you took certain risks without thinking them through.  Nowadays, such things are not beyond the usual iPhone, iPad, and Internet-using generation’s understanding, but it is still fascinating to think about how much people’s lives changed upon being faced with such a different and strange mental obstacle.  In all honesty, I feel like I would somewhat prefer a linear style instead of the multiple-choice style we have nowadays.  There is just so many options.  It can get quite overwhelming, especially when we don’t know what exactly we are looking for.  Linearity would at least point me in the right direction.