The Age of the Internet

The Japanese and U.S. governments both studied the concept of "wired cities" using the cable TV to deliver entertainment, information and educational services similar to those discussed today in the context of the digital revolution. On the basis of these hopes, the U.S. government allowed the cable companies to set up local monopolies. In the event, these never delivered anything other than television—with the understandable justification that user trials found minimal consumer interest in any of the other services, including interactive TV.

What, then, is different this time?

First, computers have become more powerful, cheaper, smaller, easier to use (although they still have a long way to go on this front) and more widely distributed, especially within businesses and especially in the U.S.. Many of us now have personal computers at home and also interact with computer technology in many other guises—games machines, automatic teller machines and the fifty microcomputers in a typical modern car.

Second, the Internet is a loose network which enables PCs in most large organizations and many homes and small businesses (using a standard connection to a telephone line) to communicate with each other around the world at low cost. The Internet belongs to no one (although it uses telecommunication links which do) and has no central authority; it is really a set of "communication protocols", more like a language than a physical network, which means that any computer, whatever its internal language, can communicate with any other. The Internet has existed for many years as an academic network, but took off as a mass application only in the mid-1990's. This was partly because of the invention of new software (the World Wide Web and "browsers") which made it easier to find useful information and move between different sites.

The Internet exhibits a characteristic crucial for all successful communication networks: that their value to each member increases with the number of other members. The same happened with telephones and, more recently, fax machines: neither would be useful—except as a status symbol—if no one else had one. Once enough other people were on the Web, it became worthwhile for yet more people. In reality, despite all the talk of Websites, "surfing" and cyber-commerce, the main way most people (including the authors) use the Internet today is for electronic mail (e-mail)—typed messages and documents sent from one PC to another. The e-mail population reached "critical mass" in about 1995.