INTERNET

The technical accomplishments leading to the construction and prevalence of the Internet are well documented. Much of this documentation is available over the Internet itself, including those resources published by administrative groups responsible for Internet standards and practices.

A Brief History of the Internet

In brief, the Internet originated with the conceptualization and realization of a robust packet-switched network. The first packet-switched network designs came from Paul Baran's research at RAND Corporation in the 1960s and, independently, from Donald Davies and his colleagues at the U.K. National Physics Laboratories. Shortly thereafter, Leonard Kleinrock and UCLA's Network Management Center used packet-switching techniques to develop and refine the ARPANET, the immediate precursor to the Internet. The first ARPANET connection was successfully completed in 1969.

Packet-switching—a method of communicating data from one computer to another—allowed the construction of a single network capable of linking together a large number and variety of interior hardware and software configurations. Packet-switching technologies were standardized and put into widespread use as the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) in 1983. The implementation of TCP/IP led to exponential growth in the capacity and use of the Internet: Internet backbone speeds increased from roughly 56 kilobits per second to over 2 gigabits per second by 2002; hosts grew from about 500 in 1983 to close to 150 million by the early 2000s.

Two major events since 1983 drastically changed the appearance and use of the Internet, making the fledgling network both more accessible to mass audiences and more adaptable to recreational and leisure-time use. The first was the commercialization of the Internet in 1991; the second was the 1993 public release (through the Mosaic browser) of Tim Berners-Lee's earlier software innovation, the World Wide Web (WWW).

Commercialization radically changed the content available over the Internet, and the World Wide Web provided a new method—based on a simplified visual interface and command structure embedded with hyperlinks—for transferring files. Both these changes were instrumental in the rapid global diffusion, acceptance, and use of today's Internet.

Popular Uses of the Internet

Though the Internet does not yet have the volume or history of research dedicated to other popular media (e.g., television and film), Internet studies are, in general, more timely and accessible than those devoted to older media. In addition to a growing number of studies using conventional research methods—widely available within online archives—Internet research benefits from the constant monitoring and updating of data that measure the technical components of network use.

Though Internet use continued to grow dramatically, in 2004 it had yet to achieve the widespread penetration of television. Prior to the last decade, Internet use had been confined to a relatively younger, more affluent, and much more highly educated segment of the world's population than the television-viewing audience. However, many of these differences were shrinking as the Internet user population grew—most particularly in developed countries. For instance, the average age of the Internet user in the United States was approaching forty in 2004, and the percentage of women using the Internet at home had grown over the previous five years to be roughly equal that of men.

E-mail is clearly the most common use of the Internet for the 60 million Americans who go online every day. Sending and receiving messages over the Internet is most often accomplished asynchronously, though synchronous communications software—for example, "Instant Messaging" services—is increasingly popular among the Internet's younger users.

The most popular functions of the Internet for mass audiences (other than e-mail) are associated with information receiving rather than information sending. Most often, the information sought is intended for recreational and leisure-time use. For instance, searching for news and weather information has not rated as highly in user surveys as has searching for "hobby" information.

Although there is some evidence that the Internet has partially displaced television viewing as a leisure-time activity, there is less evidence of similar displacements of newspaper reading, radio listening, or other media-related activities. In comparison to other media use, then, the Internet is best regarded as a time-enhancing rather than time-displacing technology.

Research is less clear concerning the impact of the Internet on socializing with friends, family interactions, and the psychological well-being of its heaviest users. Some researchers have found social relationships formed during Internet use are less intimate and less fulfilling than those formed in more conventional contexts, resulting in an increased likelihood of depression and lone-liness; others—including some of the Internet's heaviest and most accomplished users—have emphasized the more positive aspects of those relationships established and sustained through computer-mediated communications and the Internet.

Communications Play on the Internet

E-mail Electronic mail was implemented on the ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson in 1971—a couple of years after that network became functional. Not part of the original network design, the first electronic mail protocols were intended to aid technical resource sharing and scientific information exchange over the ARPANET. However, stripped of the formal mediation between sender and receiver that dominated telex and telegram transmissions, e-mail messages came to be used in more spontaneous, intimate, and expressive ways. Almost immediately after becoming publicly available, e-mails—and similar, related forms of computer-mediated communications (CMC)—were transformed into personalized contexts for play.

The personal nature of e-mail encouraged its rapid growth through the late 1970s, when proprietary systems of dial-up message exchange services (e.g., MCI Mail, CompuServe) were developed and marketed for use with home computers. The personal computer revolution also proved a catalyst for the development of private bulletin board systems (BBS); personal computer owners and enthusiasts installed and widely used these systems in the late 1970s and early 1980s as free e-mail storage and forwarding systems within local telephone exchanges. Early BBS functions and capabilities were eventually absorbed into the Internet, which was able to connect larger audiences over much broader geographical areas at less cost. However, many of the most unique and most playful characteristics of e-mail first appeared during the early promulgation of personal bulletin board systems; representative examples of these include "emoticons," "flaming," and the now ubiquitous "spamming."

Initial studies of Internet communications emphasized the faceless nature of the medium and its corresponding lack of "social presence." However, e-mail users were quick to find methods of communicating emotional content that were analogous to the facial expressions, verbal tones, and body language of offline communications —though often quite different in form.

Emoticons are the most obvious examples of the personalization of e-mail texts. Playful creations of early email users, these text-based symbols are created by using the visual characteristics of keyboard characters (for example :-) indicates a smiley face). Emoticons, related forms of ASCII art—any use of the visual appearance of the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters—and the numerous shorthand acronyms of listservs had a similar function: to create a communications context unbound by the limitations and technical requirements of the medium. Sometimes, these new forms of play have been extreme.

Flaming, for instance, was a common and largely unexpected phenomenon of early communications play on home bulletin board systems: a barrage of critical messages sent in reply to previous messages. These criticisms were commonly lengthy, colorful, and even lurid—motivating further flaming in reply. Many bulletin board systems were entirely devoted to flaming activities, with groups of BBS users creating flaming clubs to hurl verbal barbs at one another—for no purpose other than play.

Spamming—sending unsolicited or junk e-mail (or spam) to often unwilling recipients—likewise represents an extreme form of systemic play within CMC, with both positive and negative impact. The ease with which mass-mailing lists could be compiled and employed within CMC contexts led to the widespread distribution of spam that, like the distribution of flames, was more often a form of play for senders than receivers—at least it was initially. By 2004, spam for tens of thousands of dubious commercial products and offers had become such a serious problem that the U.S. Congress had passed laws trying to limit its spread.

Software cracks, viruses, and Web site assaults (such as denial of service attacks) are similar forms of dysfunctional play within prevailing economic and social contexts. While initially these too might have been nothing more than personal expressions of identity within a mass-mediated communications environment otherwise governed by technical rules and limitations, by 2004 these attacks had also become much more harmful.

Chat E-mail is an asynchronous form of communication. By the late 1980s network software began to appear allowing synchronous—or real-time—message exchanges analogous to those of verbal conversations. Communications play over the Internet now commonly includes these synchronous forms, well represented by Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which was developed in 1988, and its many descendants, such as AOL's Instant Messenger.

Synchronous, online group communications software for recreational use originated as a MUD (multiuser dungeon) in 1979 when Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University in the United Kingdom collaborated on the first online multiplayer adventure game: MUD1. MUD1 was a multiplayer adaptation of Will Crowther's ADVENT, or The Colossal Cave (1975), which eventually spawned an entire genre of single-player computer adventure games. MUD1—and MUDs in general—allowed a number of players to interact with one another (chat) in real time within a text-based virtual landscape (or "dungeon") using a rudimentary parser—a computer program that interprets the syntactic structure of a series of symbols or commands—and simple subject-verb commands ("use key," "open door"). Later versions of the software were labeled Multi-User Domains (or Dimension) to divorce their use from dedicated adventure game play.

MOOs—object oriented MUDs—were a subsequent refinement of the MUD software that allowed a more interactive virtual environment and user modifications of that environment. Both MUDs and MOOs have been adopted for a variety of educational and professional uses, but are most commonly used as a form of recreational communications and role-play over the Internet. Along with the evolution of graphics displays, the virtual environment for these role-playing activities has moved from a text-based screen to a more visual—and increasingly three-dimensional—context.

MUD1 was licensed to CompuServe as British Legends and discontinued as a commercial service in 1999. Other versions of the MUD software have since been used to develop more commercially viable MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games. The first widely played MMORPG was Ultima Online (1997), a multiplayer adaptation of Origin Systems' Ultima, a long-lived single-player computer role-playing-game series.

Everquest, a rather conventional role-playing game in the Dungeons and Dragons tradition with an innovative three-dimensional interface, came to dominate the MMORPG market soon after its release by Verant Interactive in 1999. The game, acquired by Sony Online Entertainment in 2000, had grown to over 250,000 subscribers by 2004 and created a strong secondary market of related web sites, offline information resources, and character equipment and item barter and exchange.

MMORPGs provide an imaginative and mutable context for play and are associated with large and active online—and offline—communities of players, which extend and reinforce that play. Further evolution and refinement of MMORPGs are likely as the form proves increasingly profitable.

In 2004, synchronous communications play over the Internet—including use of generic network chat applications—was much less common than e-mail and World Wide Web use. Internet Relay Chat, for instance, had changed little in form, function, or primary use since its inception in Finland in 1988. While e-mail has proven a popular alternative to conventional postal services, IRC and its derivatives have not been as widely used as substitutes for offline social interactions. Synchronous communications play over the Internet remained restricted to a relatively younger, more affluent, and more technically inclined group than users of the Internet as a whole—and there were questions as to whether the most active users of role-playing games benefit from their play or were perhaps even harmed by it.

Social Impact of Internet Play

The recreational use of the Internet can be applied to such a broad class of CMC-related activities that there is little fundamental distinction between recreational and nonrecreational use of the medium. Databases, educational programs, and business web sites—among many other online forms—engage users with graphics displays, software interfaces, and client-server hardware that parallel those used (and often first developed) to facilitate games and play.

One of the most critical issues left undecided concerning the recreational use of the Internet as of 2004 was whether online communications functions negatively inhibited or more positively supplemented and sustained offline social relationships. This was an issue raised most pointedly regarding Internet-based role-playing activities in MUD and MOO environments. Survey research presented evidence documenting both positive and negative outcomes—including contrary results published by the same research teams.

Research has found evidence of online communications activities that enhanced and substituted for (in some diminished capacity) offline interactions, but there was little similar evidence indicating that face-to-face social interactions were wholly eliminated in favor of their online facsimiles. Aside from those studies citing Internet "addiction" (an affliction most often compared to gambling addiction) among a small percentage of the user population, the most recent studies and analyses as of 2004 displayed a growing reluctance to accept those theoretical models that explained and predicted Internet use and effects based solely on the unique technological characteristics of computer-mediated communications.

To a great extent, controversies over the impact of Internet use for recreation and leisure appear similar to those controversies concerning the impact of play with other media and within other contexts. Perhaps it is only because the Internet has spread so widely and so quickly that these controversies have had little chance to be resolved with any significant measure of accuracy or satisfaction. However, it is also likely that Internet entertainment and play are more distinctive in form than in function from their offline counterparts. If so—if indeed the debate over Internet use and its outcomes is rooted in yet controversial characteristics of human behavior rather than in some more definitive and objective characteristics of networked digital media—then there is little assurance that resolutions will be soon forthcoming.

Play on the Internet, like play in many other contexts, continues to have variable and often unpredictable effects. Internet play raises issues of privacy, censorship, and security that are undetermined—and perhaps undeterminable—by existing social policies, legal precedents, or cultural values. Internet research, while topical and timely, has yet to establish clear and detailed trends of Internet use and effects within a stable communications environment.

As Internet content and functions continue to evolve rapidly, it is likely much about the future use of the Internet will confound contemporary media theory. However, many aspects of the recreational use of the Internet appear determined by those characteristics of human communicators that persist across media and cultures. Human play is one of the most fundamental of those characteristics.

See also: Computer/Video Games, Computer's Impact on Leisure

BLIOGRAPHY

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Yamauchi, Yutaka, and Jean-Francois Coget. "Untangling the Social Impact of the Internet: A Large-Scale Survey." Information Systems Working Paper 1-02. The Anderson School at UCLA. 2002. Available from http://www.anderson.ucla.edu.

David Myers