How Internet Has Changed Our Lives

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Historian James Burke proposed the universe exists as we perceive it through what we know and if you change your perception with new information, you have changed the universe.  

In 1712, Thomas Newcomen, building on the work of Thomas Savery and Denis Papin, capitalized the idea of condensing steam in a cylinder and forcing the resulting vacuum to cycle a piston up and down. He created an inefficient and crude steam engine with the purpose of pumping water from flooded mines. 53 years later, James Watt refined the Newcomen engine to create a true external combustion engine. When Watt’s patent expired in 1800, the age of steam arrived in full force. It transformed life on a grand scale. Inventors from all walks of life used the Watt based system for mining, milling, material fabrication, weaving, and transportation. Each new steam power invention spawned dozens more. Old jobs faded and new ones created. The stream engine railroad system brought distant people together and inadvertently diversified the human genome beyond the isolation of medieval villages. Social order shifted with the rise of a middle class born of a steam-driven industrial revolution.

The universe changed.

One hundred and sixty-five years after Watt's patent expired, in an MIT Lincoln lab, two computers began sending information to each other in packets keyed to a destination and carrying their respective payload. The foundational basis of how the internet functions blossomed into existence with this transfer.

Less than a decade after those initial packets were sent back and forth, U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network connected to the Royal Radar Establishment of Norway and University College of London using the same distributed packet system like those in the MIT Lincoln Lab. At that time, this distribution system had no practical application, no forewarning of the transformation yet to come, but the methods by which scientists exchanged information was the birth of the internet we know today.

Just as Watt's creation transformed the world with machines so amazing those living a century before would assume they were magic, so too has the work of the MIT lab transformed the world. Close your eyes...reach out with your hand....everything that brushes against the tips of your fingers has ties to this new form of communication called the internet. It is hard to imagine life without that creation.

From the humble pen on your desk to the hand that uses it are all connected to the global web of data that now binds us all. Businesses send and receive orders, process accounting, advertise, manage staff, disseminate vital statistics, even seek out new employees through the same packet/payload system perfected in the MIT Lab. Searching the paper for an employer to mail your resume too is as archaic as using a quill, parchment, and pigeons. Job seekers scan message systems so numerous that a new industry spawned, the aggregate job seeker systems to collate possible matches into manageable numbers at a single location. One isolated to a single building, many businesses now spread their employees across the globe and connect them to singular and cooperative purposes via internet powered virtual workspaces. The internet has seen dozens of jobs go the way buggy-whip craftsman. Companies now need a sea of web programmers to deal with the web interconnectivity that grows exponentially with each day.  The great bastions of retail shopping are dying in the age of internet retail options. Sears and Toy's R Us have faded into antiquity with Amazon and eBay now dominating our shopping options.

Perhaps the greatest change is the change in social connectivity. The Internet eroded geographic fetters unlike anything in human history. A global culture is merging, shaping, becoming homogenized, as everybody is now interconnected by our phone, computer, television, printer, and refrigerator. Analog communication is fading its myriad of diversity and into common global one.  Groupings now extend beyond national boundaries and include members from all over the globe. Friendships are born and exist between people who have never met face to face. Dating has moved from the malt-shop to virtual spaces that only exist within the realm of cyberspace wear couples can express their deepest feelings in private. A multitude of languages is fading out of existence with a mere 5% having transitioned to the global internet community. High School reunions, the need to reconnect with friends from our teenage years. has become as pointless as running boards on cars. We now can stay in contact with the friends of our youth via a multitude of applications running on the phone in our pocket.  

There are entire industries devoted to people keeping in contact with other people, making and changing friendships and relationships with dizzying speed.  This change has been so effective that people spend huge amounts of time just organizing their personal communications. Lawsuits and counter-suits fed from the sale and purchase of the personal information acquired by these warehouses of data represent billions revenue and possible revenue. The water-cooler discussion of politics has evaporated like a puddle on a hot day as global discussion boards replaced them. Every speech, lecture, and governmental decision is streamed live to the global community to view in the palm of their hand. Every citizen now has both microphone and camera putting elected officials under constant watch.

The compact disk has joined its predecessors, vinyl records, 8-track, and cassette, in the bottom of the closet as anachronistic devices of bygone eras. Internet-connected devices have eradicated the local music store. Full albums, as well as tantalizing tidbits, are available with a few taps of a finger. In the blink of an eye, an artist performing in their garage can become a worldwide sensation, and every popular song needs an accompanying video imagery to replace radio's theatre of the mind personal interpretation.

The video rental store, born during the Internet's infancy died as it came of age with streaming films over the internet. The ease of video entertainment has spawned entire industries from home theatre systems including popcorn machines to industrial espionage firms seeking to prevent a movie being sent to the highest bidder with the click of a button.

Even learning systems have been affected by this global transformation. The doldrums of the classroom moved to the web and are now enlivened with bright graphics and guest speakers from every continent. Major and minor universities alike have a plethora of distant learning options connecting students and teachers without either every setting foot on a campus. The trip to the library for term paper research is now pointless as the stacks of books once searchable from the catalog of cards are now readily available from the comfort of our bed. Information of every genre, taste, length, and topic from all over the world are ready for reading with our favorite device in our selected spot. Even the staple of our grandmother's kitchen, cookbooks, now serves to level uneven couches instead of delectable dishes. Every recipe, from every country, floats in a cyberspace soup ready for viewing.

We live in an information age with instant gratification a given. Health concerns are address instantly with the dearth of information available, some good, some bad. Movies and movie reviews are readily available for view and re-viewing. For those that know where to look, some long before they reach theaters. Sports scores happen in real time and are maintained in perpetuity for reference, the same for weather, forcing former news venues to become personality-driven entertainment shows in order to compete.  Even the simple telegraph has joined the rotary phone in obsolescence. Western Union is dead and gone.

Connected to the internet, our refrigerator now tells the local grocery store when its out of milk and the toaster asks the phone for our preference of light or dark. The coffee-pot prepares a hot cup as soon as the shower informs it we have turned off the water.  The computer printer self-orders ink for itself from the manufacturer when it runs low and communicates with new devices to ready itself for use long before users need to actually print. In pre-internet days, a mechanic might struggle to diagnose automotive problems. Today, our internet-connected cars, after self-diagnosing their own issues or planned maintenance inform the mechanic of their needs.  

A long-standing staple of science fiction is the cashless society and we are rushing towards that vision. While the global reserve currency is the American Dollar, they only represent the identifiable medium of exchange. The internet conducts financial transactions of dollars between parties with the give and take of electronic bits in a database and managed by any internet connected device instead of paper slips or actualy coins changing hands. Your phone and your banking information it connects to is used to purchase goods with funds recorded by your employer.  And, decentralized digital internet currency is growing beyond the fiat based notes of nations with entire computer server farms working to earn digital money by verifying the complex algorithms of valid transactions and being the first to do so.

The dirty secret of the web, a secret uttered in hushed whispers, is that every advance on the web, every convenience offered in banking, finance, entertainment, al spawned from the biggest consumer on the web-Pornography, leading to the humorous quip the internet was built by adults for adults. The stack of dirty magazines in the basement is no more. Today, scantily clad vixens of every conceivable combination are now so readily available the viewing of such has created a new addiction where the false images are preferred over real human contact.  The sexual deviants of yesteryear who once huddled in dark rooms, now represent millions of dollars in web transactions. Lingerie, once sole dominion of Fredericks of Hollywood, is now a massive internet-based industry using models, patterns, fabrics, and styles from around the world. Wild implements, unthought of but in the mind of medieval inquisitors and ready to fulfill the darkest desires of like-minded people, are bought and sold on the internet with no more stigma than coats, dresses, and shoes.

The internet also has a dark mirror reflecting a criminal underbelly.   Pickpockets no longer need a dark alley, they can lift the password connecting you to your money when you aren’t looking and empty your accounts.  Years of working to build credibility and a pristine reputation can be torn asunder in seconds using the internet as a vicious weapon instead of a productive tool. The faceless reach of such criminality extending across national borders make the apprehension and even prosecution of these thieves difficult. The theatre of this new venue is redefining what is or is not an act of war and the response. The anonymity of the internet makes this threat all but impossible to trace to government intent or individual operations.

During the time of Newcomen and Watt, war was a dirty affair of disease, pain, and suffering for both sides. The weather had as much effect on battle as troop strength and readiness. Artillery resculpted the land of both nations. Just as the Internet is used by criminals on innocent victims, nations are using the internet to battle other nations. Foes have weaponized the invention to bring us together to wage a new type of war, a war where the internet we depend on is turned against us or just denied its use.  The same informational aid that drives trucks to their destinations and interconnects doctors to hospitals is made silent. The data that propels modern business, locked and held for ransom. Naval ships patrolling the vast seas are blinded as their navigation systems unexpectedly quit. Distributed power systems of electricity shut themselves down plunging the nation back into the 18th century.

In a world of seven billion people, no two people have the same daily life. But each of them has their lives affected in some way by the invention born in that MIT Lincoln Lab. The world's poorest of the poor, isolated from even electrical power, are, in some way, touched by the global web that now binds us all.

The universe has changed.