Internet Addiction

1306 Words3 Pages

Future of the Internet

Introduction

In 1969, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) inaugurated ARPANET, a small network of high-speed supercomputers designed to withstand military attack. The purpose of ARPANET was to enable researchers and scientists to share one another’s computer facilities by long distance for national research and development projects. However, writes author Bruce Sterling, “The main traffic on ARPANET was not long-distance computing. Instead, it was news and personal messages.”

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, ARPANET grew, accommodating many different types of computers, until it was incorporated in 1989 within the National Science Foundation’s own computer network, which became known as the Internet. According to Sterling, “Its users scarcely noticed, for ARPANET’s functions not only continued but steadily improved.” As the availability of personal computers increased, the Internet gradually progressed beyond the purview of military and research institutions into schools, libraries, and the business world.

The Internet has since become the world’s fastest-growing communications medium, surpassing fax machines and cellular telephones. What was once a network of four computers in December 1969 is now a vast amalgam of more than forty thousand computer networks accommodating more than fifty million users as of the beginning of 1997.

The development perhaps most responsible for the Internet’s astonishing growth was the creation and immediate popularity of the World Wide Web (also called the Web or WWW) in 1991. The Web is a collection of commercial, educational, and personal “Web sites” that contain electronic pages of text and graphics. Other popular featur...

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...licts that may compel them to spend too much time on the Internet.

As the Internet grows exponentially—“by at least another factor of 100” by the year 2001, according to software developer Charles H. Ferguson— concern toward problematic use of the Internet promises to increase. According to Viktor Brenner, a Marquette University assistant professor of ed- ucation, “Virtually everything that exists can be found in cyberspace, so the range of persons who use—and might abuse—computers and the Internet is wider than ever before.” Nevertheless, Brenner concedes that “we have no data on what types of behaviors would constitute this ‘addiction,’ its prevalence, or who ‘gets addicted.’” Internet addiction is among the issues explored in The Future of the Internet, in which authors discuss the phenomenon of the Internet and its impending effects on individuals and society.

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