The History of the Internet in Byte-Sized Chunks (Bite-Sized Chunks) - Tapa dura

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Chris Stokel-Walker is a freelance journalist specializing in technology and digital culture. He is the author of YouTubers: How YouTube Shook up TV and Created a New Generation of Stars, and TikTok Boom: China's Dynamite App and the Superpower Race for Social Media. His work has appeared in The New York Times, WIRED, New Scientist, the Guardian and The Times. He teaches journalism at Newcastle University.

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When’s the first time in the day that you interact with the internet?
   For many people, it’ll be when they first pick up the mobile phone sat on their bedside table and scroll through emails, check their WhatsApp groups, or look for the latest social media updates.
   It might be when you open a news app like the BBC’s or CNN’s and catch up on events that happened overnight. Or perhaps it’s your morning burst of Duolingo – the glitzy, gamified language learning app that claims to be able to make you fluent if you give it enough attention. It could be a check of the weather, updates to which are beamed from any number of providers to your phone on demand. Maybe it’s a quick scrub through a YouTube video as you try to linger a little longer in bed.
   For a growing number, their first online interaction comes before all that. The burgeoning industry of the internet of things (IoT) – devices that are connected to the internet – means that the alarm clock that wakes you up, or the lights that slowly get brighter to try to ease you into the day in a modern mimicry of nature, could well be connected to the internet.
   Whichever it is, one thing is for sure: for the overwhelming majority of you reading this book – for almost everyone except my resolutely analogue parents, who are happy with their chunky, unconnected mobile phone – you’ll have an early morning interaction with the internet.
   It’s a story that repeats itself as the sun moves westwards across the planet, waking up one country then the next in its regular routine.
   The internet never sleeps, even if you do. A constantly updating, ever-growing behemoth, there’s always something happening online. That’s natural when you consider that the internet is a rapidly expanding community of 5 billion people – and millions more bots and artificial intelligence-powered facsimiles of humankind – with new users logging on every day.
   That’s what makes it quite so addictive. There are close to 2 billion websites to explore, new shores on the constantly expanding map of charted territory that the average internet user is free to visit. And on those websites, there are new bits of content: millions of new videos on TikTok every day and hundreds of hours of new footage on YouTube every minute.
   There are new tweets, new Facebook posts, new Instagram Stories. There are new comments on forums, on subreddits, within comment sections. There are new Google searches to be made and new Wikipedia pages to explore; new avenues of information to go down.
   There are new emails to be read – a third of a trillion of them sent daily, by one estimate – and new chat messages to be consumed. There are new baby photos and memes to be viewed; new congratulations and commiserations to be sent and received.
   Little wonder, then, that we are addicted. Our dopamine receptors are being spammed. There are always new things to be learned, new adventures to be had, new people to be met behind every profile picture, every post and every swipe right. There is always more.
    Six in ten Britons cannot imagine their everyday lives anymore without the internet – roughly the same proportion as Nigerians, Swedes and Brazilians. (Americans are far more aloof: just 45 per cent say that it’s unimaginable to be offline.)
   This is the story of how we got to this point. It’s the story of the unreal technology that delivers every bleep and buzz and blaring red notification icon to our ears and eyeballs. It’s the history of the internet, and of everything we consume through it.
   Some of these stories will be familiar to you. Others won’t be. When dealing with something as large and ever-growing as the internet, you’re bound to pick up a nugget of new information along the way – just as you’re likely to encounter the same tired old meme you’ve seen circulating on Facebook for years now.
   There’ll also be bits missing. You can’t sum up the history of the internet in a 224-page book without skipping some parts, even if you keep each entry as concise as it is comprehensive.
   The size of Wikipedia at the start of 2023 was 4,349,234,241 (four billion, three hundred and forty-nine million, two hundred and thirty-four thousand, two hundred and forty-one) words. This book is 55,000 words long, or roughly one-one hundred thousandth of that number. Even in 2002, a little under a year into Wikipedia’s existence (which we’ll get onto later), the sum total of its word count was roughly one hundred times greater than this book’s.
   Yet this book tries to give shape to an always expanding, spreading blob of bits and bytes. It may seem a bit like herding cats (which the internet also likes), but it’s an attempt to bring shape, form and solid factual information to the online world.
   It tries to encapsulate what the internet is, where it came from, where it’s going – and what it’s doing to us – in as much detail as possible. The hope is to give you the curated, considered history of the internet, in bite – or byte – sized pieces.