COMM 1500 Chapter 14
"12 Entrepreneurs Predict: What Will the Internet Look Like in 2030?"
By Ilya Pozin Founder of Pluto TV 1. Online businesses will run through corporations. Major corporations, market consolidators, and equity firms are growing while the trend is for fewer solopreneurs, bootstrappers, and small mom-and-op type online businesses. In 2030, most online businesses will run through major corporations, with much less entryway for low-investment entrepreneurs. 2. The Internet won't exist. In ten years, people will not refer to "the Internet." Instead, they will just know technology through the connected devices that work behind the scenes to make their lives easier: phone, glasses, laptop, homes, cars, etc. Everything will be connected in ways that simply integrate with their lives. 3. It will work like television. There will be plenty of entertainment, viewers, and ad dollars, without load times. It will probably take Google until 2030 to roll Google Fiber out to every major city, but once it is successful, the Internet will be as seamless as flipping the channel on a television. 4. It will work more like an operating system. The user interface of major websites will likely continue in the direction of feeling more like an application or operating system and less like static pages. It will likely be centered around mobile web and touch-screen interface. 5. The Internet will come to you. Right now, people are actively "going to" engage with the Internet, but in the future, the Internet will simply exist as part of everyday interactions. Just like the air we breathe, it will be a critical component of your life, but you will not necessarily recognize its presence. Also, while traditional devices like tablets will still exist, they will only make up a fraction of your internet usage. 6. It will change the way we work. Today, many startups provide on-demand labor for consumer services, and Amazon and Google have followed suit. People want flexibility in their work, and the penetration and usage of smartphones simplifies making money with just a click. In 2030, there might be tens of millions of people clicking to find multiple shifts with different employees each week. 7. Online and offline will merge. If technological trends run their course, we will not be thinking of "the Internet" at all. We will use screen and voice interfaces to access algorithmically curated information from human and machine sources. Interfaces will be layered on top of the physical world. Augmented reality, the Internet of things, and abundant bandwidth will make the Internet as we know it a quaint phase. 8. It will adopt artificial intelligence. As the Internet continually becomes more saturated with information, and computers become more powerful, artificial intelligence online will become more advanced out of necessity and convenience. Natural language processing, audio (spoken) search processing, and more intelligent filtering of results will become normalized. We might even have cloud-based AI assistants and search aids. 9. It will be an omnipresent force. The Internet will feel more like an omnipresent force than a network where we have to make the choice to opt into. Every person on the planet will have access, and it will be nearly impossible to opt out in 2030. Everything from our bodies to our cars, from our homes to the stores we frequent, will be one and connected into this omnipresent force. 10. It will be dominated by big data. The Internet will be dominated by big data, both for business and general consumers. It will be more accessible, allowing both businesses and individuals to make better purchasing choices. 11. It will become more user-friendly. Many improvements will be made with the result that it will take a decreasing number of steps to complete a task. The Internet will be more use-friendly and intuitive. There is still so much room for improvement in this area. Shopping online involves way too many steps, from finding exactly what you are looking for, to adding it to your cart, to entering in all of your credit card information, address, etc. 12. It will transcend boundaries. The Internet will change a lot from what we know now. In particular, it will open up new horizons for startups. Geographical boundaries become less relevant, virtual nations creating new markets, and businesses influencing and engaging people who were not previously within reach.
Most Viewed YouTube Video of All Time
"Gangnam Style," by the Korean pop star Psy
Packet Switching
A method of data transmission that breaks a message into small units (packets) that are routed independently and then reassembled.
Troll
A person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, usually by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community with the deliberate attempt of provoking readers into an emotional response, or at least disrupting normal on-topic discussion, often for their own personal amusement. Current media coverage has tended to equate trolling with online harassment: e.g., defacing Internet tribute sites with the goal of causing grief to families. There are even troll sites the New York Times describes as constituting "an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore."
Hyperlink
A reference to data users can access either by clicking or hovering.
The Long Tail of E-Commerce
A traditional store exists in a specific physical space, which translates to a limited amount of shelf space on which to put products. That requires the owner to calculate what items can be put on those shelves that will actually be bought by customers and generate enough revenue for the business to thrive or at least survive. However, online retailers are able to offer products because they just need a storage space, which could be anything from a closet to a warehouse, and not a brick-and-mortar store that customers can walk through and shop. Consequently, e-commerce is changing that because of what is known as "the Long Tail." The best sellers of today produce a fraction of the revenue they did before, while specialty and niche goods are more profitable than ever before. In e-commerce the long tail (red section of the above graph), made up of products that are low in demand or sales, can collectively equal or exceed the bestsellers and blockbusters that make up the "head" (green section of the above graph). So while your local baseball card shop would focus on older cards and more recent specialty cards that could be sold for tens and hundreds of dollars for customers who mostly live in town or in the surrounding area, online sellers can set up websites and/or listings on eBay and sell hundreds and thousands of cards to customers around the country (if not the world). Because of reduced marketing and distribution costs, goods sold on the Internet can return more of a profit than they would if sold in a regular store. Amazon started out as an online bookseller before diversifying to sell not only CDs, DVDs, and video games, but eventually electronics, toys, apparel, furniture, jewelry, and even food, making it the largest Internet-based retailer in the country. When you combine Amazon with the online auction and shopping website eBay, you stand a good chance of being able to find just about product you can think of (and if that last 1956 Topps baseball card you are looking for is not available on, come back next week and search again). E-commerce consists of not only online shopping websites for direct retail sales to customers and online marketplaces where businesses and other consumers can make sales to customers, but also business-to-business transactions and data interchange, gathering and using demographic data collected through web contacts and social media, and marketing to established and prospective customers via e-mail. The advent of digital printing has made print on demand (POD) possible, whereby copies of books are not printed until an actual order has been received. Being able to print books singly, or in small quantities, means a publisher does not need to store copies of every book it offers. University presses, for example, can use POD to maintain a large backlist, or even for all of their publications, while larger publishing companies can use it as a way to keep selling older books. It is e-commerce that makes print on demand profitable, because selling books online provides a larger customer base than publishers would have otherwise.
The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life."
Andrew Brown
Dark Side of the New Media
As soon as people started using personal computers, they became the targets of not only computer savvy criminals out to steal information and money but also other users, often anonymous, who launch viscous online attacks. Most of the problems that afflict users of new media are the ones with which you are already familiar, but there are also aspects of the dark web that should be news to you. 1. Malware 2. Bullying, Trolling, and Flaming 3. Cyberbullying 4. Flaming 5. Spam 6. The Dark Web
New Media
Content available on-demand through the Internet, accessible on any digital device rather than on traditional media such as newspapers and television.
Amputations
Defined by Marshall McLuhan as the counterpart of extensions, whereby as a new media/technology extends our senses/bodies, there is a corresponding amputation by which we lose something
Digital Media
Digitized content that can be transmitted over the Internet or computer networks and access through digital devices.
Other Social Media
Foursquare is a local search and discovery service mobile app which provides search results for its users, Foursquare takes into account the places a user goes, the things they have told the app that they like, and the other users whose advice they trust, to provide recommendations on place to go near the user's current location. Digg calls itself "the homepage of the Internet, featuring the best articles, videos, and original content that the web is talking about right now." Originally a popular social news website, where people were above to vote web content up ("digging") or down ("burying"), Digg was launched in its current format as a news aggregator in 2012. Reddit is an entertainment, social networking, and news website with registered community members able to submit content in the form of text posts or direct links. Essentially, Reddit is an online bulletin board system for topics including news, gaming, movies, music, books, food, fitness, and photosharing, among numerous others. Registered users are then able to vote content up or down to organize the posts and determine their position on the site's pages. Podcasting consists of an episodic series of audio or visual files. These can take other forms, such as podcast novels (a.k.a. a serialized audiobook or podcast audiobook). The first video podcast is believed to have been Dead End Days (2003-04), a black comedy about zombies made up of 48 episodes, each 5-10 minutes long. The premise was that a human-zombie war had been narrowly averted and now corporate America was targeting the zombies as a new demographic.
Wikis
If any one element best defines Web 2.0 it would be wikis: web sites enabling visitors to make changes, contributions, or corrections ("wiki" is a Hawaiian word meaning "quick"). The first wiki was WikiWikiWeb, created to facilitate the exchange of ideas between programmers, while the International Movie Database, launched in 1990, enabled registered users to rate films, post reviews on the message boards, and submit edits to entries on everything from cast to quotations. Today, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, is the most popular wiki-based website.
Collecting Virtual Baseball Cards
As a case study of the crazy world of e-commerce, let us look at how the good old American tradition of collecting baseball cards has been updated for the age of the Internet. Instead of collecting physical trading cards, people are now collecting virtual baseball cards—otherwise known as pictures—and they are paying money to do so. Scarcity has always been a key value with trading cards (as you will be reminded in the last section of this chapter, economics is all about "supply and demand"). What is usually considered the most valuable baseball cards is the T206 Honus Wagner, issued by the American Tobacco Company from 1909 to 1911. Wagner refused to allow production of his card to continue because he did not want children to buy cigarette packs to get his card. Only 50 to 200 Wagner cards were ever distributed, and their scarcity contributes to one recently being sold for $2.8 million. The most valuable Topps baseball card is Mickey Mantle's 1952 rookie card. Cards for New York Yankees players are always valued slightly more than those of other teams, while Mantle's card are extremely popular and valuable among collectors. Originally Topps released trading cards series by series during the season for that particular sport. In the fall, Topps reduced the number of baseball cards it printed for that year's final series as it started production of football cards. In 1952, Mantle's rookie card was part of that final series, making it even rarer (there are about 1,600 professionally graded Mantle rookie cards). In 2015, a pair of Mantle rookie cards sold for $330,000 and $382,400. When the trading card business boomed in the 1980s and 1990s, Topps and other companies started creating scarcity by producing a limited number of cards. Since rookie cards (a player's first card for that company) were worth more, they started producing more rookie cards for players who were not rookies (draft picks and minor leaguers), many of whom would never reach the major leagues. Since cards were investment, they were protected and preserved in hard-plastic, screw-enforced cases. The most expensive cards are routinely graded, on a scale of 1-10; the higher the grade, the more a card is worth, which is why investors do not actually handle cards but protect them to preserve their grade. Today, you can collect not only virtual Topps baseball cards online on Topps BUNT, but also football cards on Topps HUDDLE and soccer cards on Topps KICK. Topps BUNT was launched in April 2012 and two years later the company reported having more than a million users and 75 million sports cards that collectors would never be able to find in hobby shops or retail stores because they only existed on a smartphone.18 The company also has card trader apps for Star Wars and The Walking Dead. Each day you visit these sites you "earn" (get) a certain number of credits or coins: 5,000 for the sports sites, 25,000 for Star Wars. Visit seven days in a row and you get double that amount of credits on the seventh day. You can also earn "free" credits and coins by watching commercials, taking surveys, and signing up for services such as those offered by companies and colleges. With those points you can "buy" packs of cards (the sports packs simulate being opened just like a real pack). For Star Wars the packs can range in "cost" from 2,500 to 900,000 credits, and contain anywhere from one card to fifteen cards, which is to say, a picture of what looks like a traditional trading card, the back of which does not contain a player's career statistics in their particular sport, but rather information on how many points the player earned (or lost) in their most recent game, because these cards can also be used to create lineups and play games online (thereby increasing their "value"). These packs can include base cards, which come in an ascending order of colors that denotes increased scarcity, and insert cards, often with color variations. There are "awards" for completing specific sets of cards (e.g., The Force Awakens Base Series 1 Red Set), whereby you get a special card that can only be earned that particular way. You can also spend $99.99 (real money) to buy (notice, no quotation marks this time) 1.5 million credits. Spending actual money can not only get you thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of credits, but also special cards. You can also use your cards, both duplicates and singles, to trade to get those last cards you need to complete a set (but be aware than when cards are "rare" you have to "overpay" to get them in a trade). On Star Wars Card Trader, you can tap the "New Trade" button and you can literally see every Star Wars virtual card that Topps has produced in the two years this has been up and running. You can also see that exact same virtual card in the collection of anybody else who "owns" it. This is not really significantly different from being able to look at the exact same virtual card when you tap your "My Cards" button. Since you probably have significantly less cards, it will be easier to find the card in question. But wherever you look at it in the app, it is the exact same virtual card. It can cost hundreds of dollars to get the Topps baseball cards of the stars who played when I was a kid. If I wanted to sell those cards down the road on eBay, chances are I would not only get my money back but also probably make a profit. Rather amazingly, it turns out this is happening online too, where collectors are auctioning the rights to rare cards (not the actual cards themselves since actually they are virtual cards and not actual cards) forbig money. Today, back in the real world, Topps now offers "Topps Now" cards, where each week cards representing recent accomplishments are offered for $9.99 for 24 hours only. Normally several hundred collectors order a particular card, but when pitcher Bartolo Colon on the New York Mets became the oldest major league player to hit his first career home run at the age of 42, there were 8,826 copies of the 2016 Topps Now Card #57 ordered by collectors, smashing the previous record of 1,808 for Chicago Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta's second career no-hitter earlier in the season.19 When I checked, the Colon Topps Now card was being offered for as high as $75.00 on eBay.
Sexting
Sending and/or receiving sexually explicit messages or images, primarily taking place between mobile phones.
Conclusion of Textbook
The mission statement of this book has been to increase your media literacy. Clearly, the key concept that drives that is technological determinism. Each mass media we have examined, from books to Internet, have changed the world and the ways in which we live in it, and media literacy is how we recognize, understand, and evaluate the impact of technology on our lives. This is not to suggest that you will specifically remember Marshall McLuhan's notions of extensions, and amputations but that you will recognize there are inherent advantages and disadvantages with any technology you use, mass media or otherwise. So if you only remember one thing about Media and Society over the course of the next five (or fifty) years, it would be "technological determinism." I think you were already cognizant of the three key principles laid out in the opening chapter before you read this book. The idea that the mass media are profit-centered businesses can hardly be news to anyone, any more than the idea technology drives the development of society, or that the mass media both reflect and affect society. But hopefully this textbook has reinforced those principles in your mind. Beyond that, you will probably remember a couple of the examples you read about, several of the videos you followed links to, or some statistics that stood out to you. Whatever these things you remember might be, chances are they represent your particular mass media interests and usages. I would think that these are not random remembrances, but speak to who you are as an individual in terms of your interests and experiences. A textbook like this is intended to be part of what has been called a liberal education, the "liberal" referencing not political ideology, but rather the primary educational goal of expanding what students know about the workings of the world as a necessary and vital part of their college education. By exposing students to information and ideas, a liberal education would teach students how to think, how to learn, and how to see the various aspects of society that make the world go round. No matter what you want to be when you finally grow up, having an understanding and appreciation of the humanities, arts, and sciences provides a well-rounded education that should result in well-rounded students. If I were to lament any one aspect of the brave new world that awaits you, it would be the increasing fragmentation of the American society. When I started teaching classes about television I could talk about M*A*S*H and the daytime soap opera All My Children and have almost every student in my class covered. Today, I bet it would take more than a dozen different programs to cover a class with only 20-30 students. It has been years since I have been able to find a single movie that everybody in class had seen (short of my screening it for them), because lots of students have never seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens or Star Wars, let alone The Wizard of Oz or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or Titanic or Avatar. The most popular shows on television today have Nielsen ratings that would have gotten them cancelled a generation ago. Our Global Village is one in which shared experiences are becoming fewer and farther between, because individualization is the name of the game. Not that long ago being on an airplane flight that lasted long enough for the airline to screen an in-flight movie was a treat. Now every passenger gets their own television screen and can pick from a range of movies and other options during their flight. Is this fragmentation a good thing or a bad thing? You're media literate. You tell me.
Main Characteristics of the Way We Use Digital Media Today
1. Digital Media are Mobile: We spend an average of two hours each day on mobile devices, which is about one-third of our total online time. Millennials and digital media users spend even more time, with those 16-24 the heaviest daily users at 3.25 hours a day. Those 55-64 only use mobile devices 0.58 hours a day, which suggests that average number is going to move toward that three hour mark.2 Mobile devices have advantages, especially in emerging countries, because they are more affordable than personal computers or laptops, and can be used almost anywhere, almost all of the time. 2. Digital Media are Social and Interactive: Far and away the most popular online activity is social networking, where on average we devote 1.8 hours (or 30% of our daily online time) each day.3 Social networking covers everything from e-mail and instant messaging, to sharing posts, pictures, activities, events, and interests with others. You can still go old school and just give someone a call on your smartphone, but you can also FaceTime with them. 3. Digital Media are Flexible and Interactive: Digital media give you more of an active role and more control over what you use and engage compared to traditional media. Because of user accounts and cookies, content is customized for you based on your characteristics and patterns of using the Internet. You can personalize your smartphone by customizing it, adding, moving, or removing the applications so your favorite features are but one click away. 4. Digital Media are Convenient, Instant, and Fast: Not so long ago you had to be home, using a modem to connect your personal computer to the Internet so you could go on America OnLine and chat with friends. Now you can reach into your pocket and pull out a smartphone with an advanced mobile operating system that has the same features as a personal computer (and which rendered mere cell phones obsolete). Your biggest concern is with keeping your smartphone charged. The ease with which we can access and use the Internet literally brings the world to your finger tips, and if that is not true from literally every place on the planet, it is certainly moving in that direction. 5. Digital Media is more Content: What has also become easier and easier with each passing year is for people to create and distribute content and services online. That content has become increasing diverse, but its consumption focuses more on breadth than depth, because of capacity limitations. The "democratization" of content also increases quality control issues. This places increased importance on how the Internet filter content and makes recommendations to users (How often do you look beyond the first page of results when you conduct a Google search?) 6. Digital Media is Collective: The ability for people around the planet to be able to connect, share, recommend, and communicate creates the collective intelligence of McLuhan's global village where people share beliefs and ideas that can shape behavior. Because of their interactive nature, digital media have been associated with promoting online interaction, distributing knowledge between users, and enhancing collective intelligence 7. Digital Media is Fragmented and Multi-Channel: In a world where users access multiple platforms from multiple devices, there are concerns that the Internet might be in danger of splintering or breaking up into fragmented segments of connectivity, where people would have varying degrees of access to the wealth of content that exists and is growing every second. Three possible types of fragmentation
"The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow."
Bill Gates
Society and Social Media
For those posting on social media today the Holy Grail is "going viral," and having whatever is posted being shared by hundreds of thousands if not tens of millions of people. Historians will no doubt be debating the topic for centuries, but my recollection is the first thing to really go viral on the Internet was the 3D-rendered "Dancing Baby," especially once it appeared on the television series Ally McBeal as a bizarre manifestation of Ally's ticking biological clock.20 The other prime contender for the title is "The Spirit of Christmas," made by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for Fox executive Brian Graden as a video Christmas card he could send to friends for Christmas 1995 (Graden had seen the duo's first effort, "Jesus vs. Frosty." Eventually the animated short made its way to the Internet and caught the attention of Comedy Central, which hired Parker and Stone to develop South Park.21 Clearly the focus on early viral videos was on making people laugh. Do you remember such classic videos as "Star Wars Kid," "The Evolution of Dance," or "Charlie Bit My Finger"? Whether or not you do, you can still track them down on YouTube, because in the twenty-first century once something is online it is there forever. Not that all viral videos were merely entertainment. When Canadian musician Dave Carroll and his band, Sons of Maxwell, were on a United Airlines flight on the ground at Chicago's O'Hare Airport during a layover, they allegedly heard another passenger talking about baggage handlers throwing guitars around on the tarmac. Carroll arrived at his destination and discovered that his $3,500 Taylor guitar had been severely damaged.22 When his claim was rejected on the pretext that he had not made it within 24-hours, Carroll and his band wrote and released "United Breaks Guitars" Finally,the most viewed YouTube video of all time is no longer "Gangnam Style," by the Korean pop star Psy (who kicked Justin Beiber's "Baby" out of the top spot in November 2012), but Wiz Khalifa's video "See You Again" featuring singer Charlie Puth, which passed 2.9 billion views in July of 2017. "See You Again" played during the end credits of the 2015 action film Furious 7, in a tribute to the movie's star, Paul Walker, who was killed in a car crash before the film was released. The video averaged over 3 million views per day in 2017 Today, late night television talk shows have certainly embraced YouTube, probably because when people tell their family/friends/coworkers, "You should have seen what happened on Jimmy Fallon last night," they want those family/friends/coworkers to be able to see for themselves, hoping that this might be incentive enough for them to tune in that night and become regular viewers (or at least subscribe to their YouTube "channel"). The Adele video from The Late Show with James Corden has over 100 million views, while Emma Stone on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon has over 70 million. They are both entertainment and marketing (for both the television shows and their talented guests). This is how business is done in the 21st century. According to Holland Haiis, author of Consciously Connecting: A Simple Process to Reconnect in a Disconnected World, "our connection to technology has become our new addiction" in the 21st century.23 In a survey conducted for Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization devoted to helping children, parents, educators, and policymakers negotiate media and technology, 50% of teens reported feeling addicted to their mobile devices, while 59% of the parents of those teens felt their children were addicted. The survey also reported that nearly 80% of teens say they check their phones hourly, while 77% of parents feel their children are often distracted by their devices and do not pay attention to their family and 36% said they argued with their children every day about their device use.
Blogging
Originally the term was "weblog": a log kept on the web. With the advent of web publishing tools in the late 1990s, being able to start and maintain your own blog, where you could share your own experiences, observations, opinions, and whatever comes into your head became popular. There are distinct types of blog, which differ both in terms of content and the manner in which they are written and delivered: -Personal blogs. An ongoing diary or commentary written by an individual. Anybody can do it and a few achieve notable success. For example, New Yorker Julie Powell, aspiring to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a single year, originally described her experiences on a blog called the Julie/Julia Project. The blogs were eventually published as a book, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, and made into the movie Julie & Julia in 2009. -Collaborative/Group blogs. Written and published by more than one author, these weblogs are based around a single uniting theme, such as technology or politics. Some of the nominees for Best Group Blog for the Edublog Awards 15 were connectedprincipals.com, nerdbybookclub.wordpress.com, and reutherstudents.40 -Microblogging. The practice of posting small pieces of digital content such as text, pictures, links, or short videos on the Internet. Originally, microblogging was popular on sites like Tumblr and Twitter, but leading social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn also provided their own microblogging feature known as "status updates." -Corporate/Organizational blogs. In most cases a private blog used for business purposes: internally to enhance the communication and culture in an organization, or externally for marketing, branding, or public relations purposes. -Aggregated blogs. Individuals or organizations can select feeds on specific topic or about a specific project to provide combined views for its readers, who are spared the necessity of search for quality content about a topic. Types of blog also have to do with the type of media that is primarily involved, so that a blog comprising videos is a "vlog," using links is a "linklog," containing a portfolio of sketches a "sketchblog," but if it has photos then a "photoblog." If you use a mobile device it would be a "moblog," but if you go old school and write it on a typewriter and then scan it to post it online, then it would be a "typecast blog."
Twitter allows its user to send and read short 140-character messages called "tweets." The Twitter home page has a banner that reads: "See what's happening right now. Find community, conversation, and inspiration about the things you love." Founded in 2006, the online social networking service allows registered users to read and post tweets, whereas unregistered users can only read them. By 2012, Twitter had over 100 million users, posting 340 million tweets a day. That increased to over 500 million users by 2015, with more than 302 million being considered active users. John Elway, Hall of Fame NFL quarterback and currently general manager of the Denver Broncos, says, "I call Twitter the microphone for morons." How many times have you seen a news story about somebody Tweeting something, which they then take down, except people have already saved screenshots of the offending tweet? Rep. Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011 after a Twitter sexting scandal, and having originally claimed someone had hacked into his accounts, and then suffered a second sexting scandal as a candidate for mayor of New York City when it turned out he had sexted at least three women after he had resigned in the wake of the first sexting scandal. The press dubbed "Weinergate" the first big social media sex scandal, but by 2011 it was clear that Twitter was a minefield for politicians, from ABC tweeting President Obama calling Kayne West a "jackass" for interrupting Taylor Swift's award speech at the MTV Video Music Awards to Sarah Palin making up the word "refudiate."35 Celebrities from entertainment and sports have gotten into hot water making tweets that they had to delete and then offer an apology. On the other hand, sportswriter Peter King of Sports Illustrated argues "Twitter is basically what the wire services were 25 years ago—a way to keep up with events in my world instantaneously."36 Today, no one represents the power and pitfalls of tweeting more than President Donald Trump. By the time he was inaugurated, Trump has passed 20 million followers on Twitter (millions of whom were not living in the United States), which was his primary instrument for communicating with the public since the election. Trump uses his tweets to unleash his followers on opponents, including Republicans who do not fall in line with this political agenda, to attack press coverage, and to make accusations such as the one about President Obama having "bugged" the phones in Trump Tower. While Trump sees his tweets as being extremely effective, providing direct communication to the American people, it seems that the one thing most Republicans, Democrats and members of the media would agree on is that now that he is president, Trump should stop tweeting in the middle of the night.
URL
Uniform resource locaters; the web browser addresses of Internet pages and files.
Chapter 14 Timeline
1. 1958: In response to the Sputnik launch, the United States forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), within the Department of Defense. The Agency will be responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the U.S. military 2. 1961: Leonard Kleinrock of MIT writes his doctoral thesis about queuing theory and pioneers packet-switching theory. 3. 1963: ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is developed as the first universal standard for computers allowing machines made by different manufacturers to exchange data. 4. 1969: INVENTION: ARPA goes online, connecting four major U.S. universities to provide a communications network linking the country in case a military attack destroys conventional communication systems. ARPANET's massive funding allows it to pull ahead of rivals in Britain and France. 5. 1972: Electronic mail is introduced by Ray Tomlinson. He comes up with the now-iconic "@" sign to distinguish between the sender's name and the network name in the e-mail address. 6. 1989: DEVELOPMENT: Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web while Brewster Kahle invents the Internet's first publishing system, a precursor to today's search engines. The following year, ARPANET would cease to exist. 7. 1990: The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) is launched, becoming one of the first websites to popularize user-generated content in the form of user ratings and reviews (and predating the Web 2.0 concept). 8. 2006: MATURITY: Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud helps popularize "The Cloud," the computer utility model that offers nearly any software or service, including data storage, that can be done on a personal computer or larger machine.
Top 10 Websites
1. Google 2. YouTube 3. Facebook (tied with YouTube) 4. Baidu 5. Wikipedia 6. Yahoo! 7. Reddit 8. Google India 9. Tencent QQ 10. Taobao Dropping out of this Top 10 in 2017 were (11) Amazon and (13) Twitter, being replaced by Redit and Taoboa. Other popular websites in the United States are (16) Windows Live, (18) Instagram, (24) LinkedIn, (31) Netflix, (35) Imgur, and (37) eBay (which dropped from 17 and is now one spot ahead of Pornhub, the top Canadian website on the list). China now has the largest online shopping site on the Internet. Consistently across the globe we find that the most popular websites in a given country are a search engine and a social network, usually in that order. In the rest of this section we will look at the most popular social networks, with which you are probably already familiar.
In 2010, Carolyn Duffy Marsan, writing for Network World offered "10 fool-proof predictions for the Internet in 2020"
1. More people will use the Internet. 2. The Internet will be more geographically dispersed. 3. The Internet will be a network of things, not computers. 4. The Internet will carry exabytes—perhaps zettabytes—of content. 5. The Internet will be wireless. 6. More services will be in the cloud. 7. The Internet will be greener. 8. Network management will be automated. 9. The Internet won't rely on always-on connectivity. 10. The Internet will attract more hackers. When this textbook was first published in 2015, all of those predictions had basically already come true. In 2010 the number of Internet users had reached the 2 billion mark. Four years later the 3 billion mark was reached. The emergence of the smart phone allowed Internet use in developing countries to explode. Today there are more sensors than computers linked to the Internet. We can debate the relative quality of what is on the Internet, but the quantity constitutes what researchers have coined an exaflood, which threatens the abilities of both the system and of the humans who use it to deal with all that content
Types of Fragmentation
1. Technical fragmentation: because the underlying infrastructure could limit or prevent system from being able to fully interoperate 2. Governmental fragmentation: resulting from policies and actions that could prevent or limit certain uses of the Internet 3. Commercial fragmentation: where exclusive access is granted to certain providers could also prevent or limit certain uses of the Internet
Web 2.0 Functions
1. Wikis 2. Social networking 3. User-generated content 4. Collaborative efforts 5. Mash-ups 6. Mobile computing The biggest difference between Web 2.0 and the original World Wide Web (retroactively designated Web 1.0 by some) is the shift from data being posted on websites where it is simply viewed or downloaded by users, to those users now being able to create and edit online content.
IP Address
A four-part of eight-part electronic serial number that is a computer's "Internet protocol" address.
Browser
A free software program with a graphical user interface that allows users to view most online content.
Wikipedia
A free-access, free-content, noncommercial Internet encyclopedia where most users can edit more—but not all—of its articles. Launched in 2001, Wikipedia has 128,757 active editors (who make one or more active edits each month) and 26,682,525 registered editors. Consistently ranked among the ten most popular websites, it constitutes the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet. Look up information on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and chances are the information that is pulled up will come from Wikipedia. There are people who race to be the first one to update the winners of Academy Awards or major sporting events, or to record the death of a celebrity. However, the actual community that built the largest encyclopedia in history has shrunk by about a third. From the start there have been concerns over the factual reliability of the content on Wikipedia and its uneven handling, acceptance, and retention of articles about controversial subjects. Wikipedia remains unique from the other websites we are looking at in this section in that it is not operated by a corporation, but by a legion of volunteers, usually working under pseudonyms, who often bicker with each other, and that what it is trying to do and how it goes about doing it have changed little since it was founded.
Flaming
A hostile and insulting interaction between Internet users, often involving the use of profanity. "Feeding the troll" and "taking the bait" are terms used to refer to someone who, knowingly or unknowingly, responds to the original message and gives the troll what they wanted: a provoked response. While laws vary from country to country, in most cases constant flaming can be considered cyber harassment, which can result in Internet Service Provider action to prevent access to the site being flamed.
Mash-Ups
In general, a mash-up is something created by combining elements from two or more sources. For example, the television series Glee often offered mash-ups of songs, such as their Adele Mash-up of "Rumor Has It" and "Someone Like You." In computing terms, a mash-up refers to web pages or applications that integrate data and functionalities from multiple online sources.
Censorship on the Internet
In late 2015, the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) approved status code 451 to tell visitors that they cannot see the requested content due to "legal obstacles," which usually means government censorship (compared to 403 Forbidden and 404 Not Found). The code 451 was suggested by Tim Bray, a former Google engineer, inspired by Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451. Status code 451 can be used by websites like Facebook and Twitter, or network intermediaries like a firewall or Internet service providers, to make users aware of online censorship. However, while notifying citizens in repressive countries that their government is blocking specific content seems like a good idea, chances are those types of government are also going to prevent their citizens from ever seeing the 451 error code. Where this could work in democratic countries would be in situations like when the United Kingdom decided in 2012 to force ISPs to block torrent site The Pirate Bay, and ISPs could use the 451 error code instead of 403 Forbidden code.54 There are also instances of what could be considered commercial censorship. In January 2016, in a move intended to clamp down on unlicensed gun transactions, Facebook announced it was banning private, person-to-person sales of guns on both its social network site and its Instagram photo-sharing service. Facebook already prohibited users from offering marijuana, pharmaceuticals, and illegal drugs for sale. Facebook relies on its vast network of users to report any violations of new rules, and removes any post violating their policies. The company can also ban users or severely limit their ability to post on Facebook, depending on the type and severity of their violations. The company also works with law enforcement in situations where it is believed someone's life is in danger
It took eight years after it was created in 2004 for the online social networking service to reach 800 million members, making it the third biggest "nation" on Earth. By 2016, its 1.65 billion monthly active users could claim the top spot.26 Users create a user profile, add other users as "friends," exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos, join common-interest groups, and receive notifications when others update their profiles. Facebook allows you to make new friends, reconnect with old friends, and communicate with them online, not to mention using them as real-time knowledge resources. Groups on Facebook constitute communities defined by interests, ranging from popular culture (movies, television shows, and music) to social and political issues. Facebook receives more than one million reports of violations of its hate speech guidelines every day. Monika Bickert, Facebook's head of policy management, explains: "You can criticize institutions, religions, and you can engage in robust political conversation, but what you can't do is cross the line into attacking a person or a group of people based on a particular characteristic."27 In an effort to counter racist and xenophobic posts, Facebook launched its "Online Civil Courage Initiative" in January 2016.28 Users are encouraged to share their story or idea supporting counter speech, with the goal of combating online hate speech and extremism. During the 2016 election, Facebook was charged with suppressing news stories on its "Trending" section that came from conservative outlets because they disagreed with the politics, suggesting the existence of a liberal bias. While Facebook denied the charges, and former employees claimed left-wing stories were also bounced, the company also announced it would be investigating the situation.29 The incredible power Facebook has over the dissemination of news raises the question of whether the government should have a role in overseeing the company's news decisions, especially since Facebook is encouraging publishers to post content directly to Facebook and not merely provide links to stories, videos, and memes.30 However, the biggest point of contention users have had with Facebook has been over the limited nuances of the "like button," first activated in 2009. You might "like" a friend's status update about having a birthday or a baby, but it is hard to "like" a mention of a death in the family. On February 24, 2016, Facebook added a new set of reactions: Like, Love, Wow, Haha, Sad and Angry.31 So far, users seem content with the new set of options
"The Internet will become 'like electricity'—less visible, yet more deeply embedded in people's lives for good and ill."
Lee Rainie, Pew Research Center
Legal Issues on the Internet
Legal issues regarding the Internet have focused primarily on legislative efforts to keep children from encountering pornography online. The following cases have been the most significant ones to date: 1. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 (104 Stat. 652): Called by some legislators the "Great Cyberporn Panic of 1995," this was the most significant attempt by Congress to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. In an attempt to protect minors from explicit materials on the Internet, the act criminalized the knowing transmission of "obscene or indecent" messages to any recipient under 18. The act was immediately challenged on First Amendment grounds. 2. Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (521 U.S. 844, 1997): In an unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court voted to strike down the anti-indecency provisions of the Communications Decency Act in what was the first major ruling on the regulation of materials distributed via the Internet. The Court concluded that the act, which made it a crime to display indecent or patently offensive material on the Internet where a child may find it, was too vague and trampled on the free-speech rights of adults. 3. The Child Online Protection Act (1998): The COPA was intended to restrict access by minors to any material defined as harmful to such minors on the Internet, by requiring all commercial distributors of "material harmful to minors" to restrict their sties from access by minors. However, the law never took effect because three separate rounds of litigation led to a permanent injunction against the law in 2009. 4. United States v. American Library Association, Inc. (2003): The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Children's Internet Protection Act, which requires public libraries and public schools to install filtering software on computers in order to receive federal funding. 5. Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties (535 U.S. 564, 2002) and American Civil Liberties Union v. Ashcroft (542 U.S. 655, 2004). The Congress passed the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) to prevent minors from accessing pornography online. The ACLU and online publishers claimed COPA violated the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment, and sued in federal court to prevent enforcement of the act. The District Court agreed and the appeal was affirmed by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, holding that because the act used "community standards" to judge which material was harmful to minors, material that was found to be offensive in most "puritanical" communities would be prohibited from being displayed in more "tolerant" ones. On appeal, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the Third Circuit for further evaluation, which again prohibited implementation of the act, holding that COPA was likely to fail the "strict scrutiny" test because it was not narrowly tailored because it prevented some material that adults had a right to access from being published without using the least restrictive means available to protect children. Specifically, the court found that blocking software, installed by parents on home computers, could do the job without preventing free speech. 6. Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (564 U.S. 08-1448, 2011). The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that video games are a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, and held that California's law restricting the sale or rental of violent video games to minors without parental supervision was unconstitutional. The ruling constituted a significant victory for the video game industry and a corresponding defeat for child protection groups. However, several of the Court's justices suggested the issue could be reexamined in the future because of the changing nature of video games and their constantly improving technology.
Extensions
Marshall McLuhan defines media/technology as extensions of the human body.
Social Networking
Using dedicated websites and applications to interact with other users online, is perhaps is another significant defining element of Web 2.0. Social networking not only allows users to make connections with other users but also allows users to expand business contacts as well on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms.
Media Law with Internet
Media law in the age of the Internet presents some interesting problems for people seeking legal remedies. In 2003, entertainer Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for violating her privacy and the "anti-paparazzi" statute by posting an aerial photograph of her Malibu home online. The photograph was one of over 12,000 photographs taken as part of the California Coastal Records Project, a landmark photographic database. Before the lawsuit had been filed only six people had downloaded the file (and two of those had been her attorneys). Not only did Streisand lose the lawsuit and have to pay $177,107.54 in court and legal fees, it drew attention to the image, resulting in 420,000 people visiting the site.50 As a result, the Streisand Effect became the name for when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the opposite effect of publicizing the information more widely, an effect greatly facilitated by the Internet. Another example of this affect also reveals an aspect of the Internet as a place where ordinary people can get involved to right wrongs. In August 2014, it was reported that the Union Street Guest House in Hudson, New York, had a policy that allowed them to deduct a $500 fine from the deposit placed for using the location "for every negative review of USGH placed on any Internet site by anyone in your party and/or attending your wedding or event." The intention of the policy was to suppress negative reviews. What happened instead is that thousands of negative reviews of the policy were posted to Yelp and other review sites
"Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant."
Mitchell Kapor
Spam
On the one hand spam is the least destructive aspect of the dark side of new media, but on the other it is clearly the most prevalent. If you are lucky, your e-mail provider has an excellent spam filter that will send dozens—if not hundreds—of such emails directly to your junk folder. Chances are you have seen an example of the "Nigerian" scam, variations of which go back to the Spanish Prisoner scam in the 18th century. This is an advanced-fee scam, one of the most common type of confidence tricks, in which the victim is typically promised a large sum of money for which a small up-front payment is required.44 The latest versions have scammers sending forged $100 bills to be used to buy a Moneygram, and the use of forged PayPal emails, bidding on an expensive item being sold on eBay, then spoofing a message to the seller that payment has been received, trying to get you to send the item.45 In the first quarter of 2015, the proportion of spam in e-mail traffic was 59.2%, which was actually lower than in the previous quarter (December usually sees the highest percent of spam). The malicious program most often distributed via e-mail as Trojan-Banker.Win32.ChePro.ink, designed to steal confidential financial information, primarily targeting Brazilian and Portuguese banks. The United States remains the biggest source of spam (Russia is second and Ukraine third), sending 14.5% of all unwanted e-mail, but Great Britain and Brazil are actually ahead of the United States in the ranking of countries targeted by malicious mailshots. The Anti-Phishing system was triggered over 50 million times in the first quarter of 2015, with the top three organizations attacked most often being Facebook, Google, and Yahoo!
"I don't need to believe in anything anymore because it has a user rating of 4.6. So the whole notion of trust is now earned largely by collective experience rather than the symbols of faith."
Sanjay Nazerali, Dentsu Aegis Network
Interactive Experiences
Several years ago there was a cable network that rebroadcast episodes of the original Star Trek series. Viewers could comment about the episode online with selected comments being displayed on the bottom of the screen a couple of minutes after they were posted. The comments came fast and furious, and a fair share of them were pretty funny. This was an initial example of what would be considered interactive television.
Collaborative Efforts
Similarly, collaborative efforts such as crowdsourcing (outsourcing tasks to an external group of people), crowdfunding (funding a project with relatively modest contributions from a large group of individual donors), and crowdsource testing (sending out prototype software or products for testing), underscore the idea of user interactivity.
Mobile Computing
Spurred by the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices, as well as the ready availability of Wi-Fi networks, a final defining element is that users can connect with the Internet from wherever they happen to be.
The Dark Web
The Deep Web is everything on the Internet that a search engine (e.g., Google, Bing, Yahoo!) cannot find. It stands in contrast to the Surface Web, which is everything that can be indexed by a typical search engine. The Dark Web is that section of the Internet that has been intentionally hidden and requires specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. The Dark Web (also called the Dark Net by some) is only a subset of the Deep Web, so while the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, they do not denote the same things. The Dark Web consists of both small, friend-to-friend and peer-to-peer networks, as well as larger, popular networks such as Tor, Freenet, and I2P. Dark Web users refer to the Surface Web as the Clearnet because of its unencrypted nature. The Dark Web includes services for the virtual currency Bitcoin that use tumblers for money laundering, commercial markets for illegal drugs and other goods, mail order services, hacking services, carding forums along with fraud and counterfeiting services, and illegal pornography. Tor (The Onion Router), is an anonymity system that lets people use the web without revealing who or where they are, which led to the creation of hidden sites offering illegal content, services, and goods. A 2014 study by Gareth Owen of the University of Portsmouth set up servers to join the Tor network and catalog these hidden services and download HTML content to track the number of visitors to each site. Almost 80,000 hidden sites were cataloged, most of which exist for a short time and were only seen once. The study found that the biggest number of hidden services on Tor were devoted to selling illegal drugs. The rest of the top five was comprised of underground markets, fraud sites, mail services, and those dealing with Bitcoin. But while the number of sites dealing in images of abuse on Tor is relatively small, the study found 75% of the traffic observed ended up at abuse sites
YouTube
The YouTube website lists some impressive statistics about the website. YouTube has over a billion users, reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the United States, and the number of hours people spend watching videos, called "watch time," is up 60% from last year. YouTube has launched local versions in more than 70 countries, and more than half of YouTube views now come from mobile devices (YouTube's mobile revenues have doubled in the last year). YouTube has also paid out over $1 billion to rights holders. YouTube has also launched several campaigns: Your Film Festival gave filmmakers the chance to present a short film at the Venice Film Festival; YouTube Space Lab had the winning experiment chosen from 2,000 students performed and live-streamed from the International Space Station; and the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011 performed at a live-streamed concert from the Sydney Opera House after selecting 101 musicians from more than 30 countries after online auditions.
Media Literacy
The ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in a variety of forms.
Cyberbullying
The act of harming or harassing someone by using information technology networks in a repeated and deliberate manner. The increased use of technology has seen cyberbullying become increasingly common, especially among teenagers, with high-profile cases of teen suicides because of cyberbullying raising public awareness. At least forty-five states have passed laws against digital harassment, with several proposing legislation geared at penalizing cyberbullying. But as is often the case with rapidly evolving online technology, laws are lagging behind. Consider the story of Megan Meier, a 13-year-old in Missouri who died of suicide by hanging herself three weeks before her birthday. Lori Drew, the mother of a friend of Meier, had been sending the teenager messages posing as 16-year-old Josh Evans, having registered an account on Myspace. Witnesses testified Drew, her daughter and one of her employees, intended to use Meier's messages to "Josh" to get information about her and humiliate her, to pay Meier back for allegedly spreading gossip about Drew's daughter. The last message "Josh" sent ended "The world would be a better place without you." Twenty minutes later, Meier was dead. Drew was indicted and convicted of violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in 2008, but her conviction was reversed on appeal in 2009. The federal prosecution of Drew relied on the federal hacking law and prosecuted Drew for violating MySpace's terms of service by not being truthful in an online profile. A U.S. District Judge found the government's theory unconstitutional, since it would give prosecutors the power to criminally prosecute anyone for such violations, which "would convert a multitude of otherwise innocent Internet users into misdemeanor criminals."
Bullying, Trolling, and Flaming
The anonymity provided by the Internet has proven to be a convenient way of users hiding their identity while attacking others through varying types of social media
Malware
The array of malicious software designed by hackers includes viruses, trojans, ratware, keyloggers, zombie programs, and any other type of software that attempts to do one or more of these four things: 1. Vandalize your computer in some way. 2. Steal your private information and address book. 3. Take remote control of your computer for other ends. 4. Manipulate you into purchasing something. Once they are in place, malware software will steal your passwords, log your keystrokes, monitor your browsing choices, spawn pop-up windows, send you targeted e-mail, redirect your web browser to phishing pages, use your computer as a secret server to broadcast pornography files, report your personal information to distant servers, and slow down or crash your computer. Malware requires special tools to delete them from your drive.
How the Internet Works
The development of the Internet was dependent on dozens of technological innovations, from hypertext and e-mail to domain name system that gave us the ability to use plain language web addresses and the secure socket layers of Netscape's encryption system that helped make the web secure enough for e-banking and e-commerce to flourish. Let us briefly cover some of the basics of how it works. Digital networking communication is based on packet switching, where transmitted data is grouped into small blocks (packets), that can be sent via a medium that is being shared by multiple users simultaneously. The Internet links computers together because each computer has its own unique IP address. When your computer, tablet, or smartphone connects to the Internet through an Internet Service Provider (ISP), packets are able to be sent to your specific computer because of that IP address, as opposed to be sent to every computer on the Internet. When you use a web browser such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firebox, Opera, or Safari, it will identify the URL address so that you know how to locate it and bookmark specific pages and files, or to create a hyperlink on a webpage or in a text that will allow quick navigation to the site. As the number of web addresses exploded, the use of a domain name served to divide them into general groups that make university addresses (edu) distinct from commercial addresses (com) and government addresses (gov). What the Internet and digital media have done is to move us beyond mass media to interactive media. Historically, mass mediated communication has been one-way: we read a book, newspaper, or magazine that someone has written; we listen to the radio or to music; we watch a movie or a television show. Of course, we can write a letter to an author or a movie studio, or call up the local newspaper or television station. But that is not something the vast majority of people who use the mass media ever actually do. When people do respond in those ways, those responses usually come after the fact: the book has been written, the album recorded, the movie produced. You can call a radio station or a television station to complain about a program while it is being broadcast, but overall that is the exception rather than the rule.
e-commerce market
The e-commerce market is where physical goods are sold via a digital channel to users. Online shopping was expected to pass the $1.5 trillion mark in worldwide sales in 2016. Seventy-eight percent of America's have made an online purchase, with half of them having made more than one (71% shop online because they want to get a better deal).12 Mobile devices are predicted to play an increasing role in e-commerce, with one estimate predicting one-quarter of online purchases will be made on mobile devices by 2017.
Concerns with the Internet
The more we use digital media, the more we are willing to pay for being able to do so. That increased usage is also of vital interest to the economics that support the Internet, which is why as traditional digital advertising is losing its appeal and efficacy, the industry is devoted to developing innovations to create better experiences for us as users. In the chapter on Advertising we covered how compensation rates for how clients pay advertisers have changed because of the Internet. The economics of the Internet will continue to evolve, seeking a profitable equilibrium. The industries invested in the Internet face major challenges in the future. With the explosion of media content available online, consumers are searching for sources of digital media content they can truly trust. We are willing to pay for products and services that fulfill our needs, and the higher we perceive the value of those products and services to be, the more willing we are to pay for them, but trust is a vital prerequisite. BIGGEST CONCERN=SECURITY: What we do online as consumers increasing reflects our habits and behaviors online, and our online existence is threatened by inadequate security. Determined hackers can eavesdrop on what we say, impersonate us, and engage in a wide array of malicious activity. In 2014, more than 317 million new pieces of malware were created, although in nearly 90% of cases, hackers were using computer bugs that have been around for over a decade. Increasingly, cyberthieves are blackmailing victims by using ransomware that steals files or photos from your computer and demands ransom (typically $300-$500) to get a key that will decrypt your files. Today it is as vital to protect our digital identities as it is our physical selves, especially since it is becoming virtually impossible to live a completely offline life in the United States in the 21st century. There were almost half-a-million identity theft complaints in 2015, with tax- or wage-related ID theft being the most commonly reported (46%, compared to 16% for credit card fraud). The 2017 Identify Fraud Study found that $16 billion was stollen from 15.4 million American consumers in 2016, compared with $15.3 and 13.1 million victims the previous year. In the past six years, identity thieves have stolen over $107 billion.
Domain Name
The part of an Internet address that identifies the particular domain to which it belongs.
Internet Service Provider (ISP)
The private company or government organization that plugs users into the Internet.
Fragmentation
The process or state of being broken into small or separate parts.
Exaflood
The rapidly increasing stream of data transmitted by the Internet.
Interactivity
The simultaneous exchange between a human being and digital media. The computer software accepts and responds to input from people, establishing two-way communication. In fact, the output from the media comes from the input of users.58 Video games and websites are the primary examples of interactive media, where we use keyboards, computer mouse, touch screens, voice recognition, and even electronic styluses to interface with a computer. Several television shows provide interactive experiences on a regular basis. Competition programs like The Voice and Dancing With the Stars allow you to vote online for your favorite contestants and to send in Tweets that might be shown during the broadcast, while viewers of The Walking Dead get to vote on their responses to what was happening, answer trivial questions, and take polls. This type of interactivity requires using a smartphone, tablet, or computer in addition to a television, but the traditional television set has moved toward interactivity as well. Originally you had to physically turn on a television set and change the channel, as well as adjust the volume or the color. Look at all of the functions on the remote control for your television set today, all of which can be executed from the comfort of your couch, and try to imagine: Where do we go from here?
Technological Determinism
The theory that maintains a society's technology drives the development of its social structure and cultural values
User-generated Content
This covers any form of content created by online users and freely made available online: wikis, blogs, discussion forums, posts, chats, tweets, podcasts, audio files, digital images, video, and other forms of media. The freedom to create content underscores the importance of collaboration, skill-building, and discovery.
Amy Webb Predictions
We now inhabit a world where most of the news and information that has ever existed is less than 10 years old. From the beginnings of human civilization until 2003, five exabytes of data were created. We are now creating five exabytes every two days. In fact, in the minute it's taken you to read this far, 2.8 million pieces of content were shared on Facebook alone. 250,000 new photos were posted on Instagram
The Future of the Internet
What sort of brave new world do we face with the Internet? As information shared over the Internet becomes effortlessly interwoven into daily life, computication, the merging of computing and communication that blurs the distinctions between the two involving "smart agents," will become commonplace.59 Whereas a general-purpose assistant like Siri can solve various problems, many queries simply end in a web search. The advantage of Siri is to be able to talk instead of typing on the small virtual keyboard on your smartphone. Smart agents will be different because they will have service and product companies behind them, offering tailored customer service. In short, they could end up replacing a lot of the applications you might download. Smart agents will be used in the workplace to serve up information about such things as appointments, project priorities, productivity, and software choice, with recommendations being based on how an individual interacts with their digital media. The idea is that you will be able to use wearable devices, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and big data to become more aware of your world and your own behavior, which could have immense benefits in terms of health care. Not only social media but also business interactions will be shaped by telepresence and virtual reality. Of course, along with promises of what will be possible in the future come concerns. There is a consensus that our privacy will be more at risk than ever in the future, fears that artificial intelligence and robots will take jobs away from people, and a certainty that the Internet will provide even new ways for crime, stalking, bullying, pornography, and other abuses to harm victims.
