Joe Moody’s Web Adventures

Clinton was a good steward of the new information society unfolding, mainly by allowing the tech boom to flourish without government intrusion.

The web, however, owes its roots to the government. Like many technologies, the Internet would not exist without military technology.

The Internet was born around when most of Generation X took their first breath in the early 1970s. It was created as a way to decentralizing info sharing by networking computers. If one computer failed or was bombed, other computers in the network would continue operating and information would continue to flow.

After such a network was in place, it didn’t take long to be converted for more civilian purposes: first by companies and universities and by the late 1980s birthday greetings sent as electronic mail and “newsgroups” like rec-music-dylan or alt-tasteless-jokes filled the circuits.

Email brought back the written letter as a primary form of communication, previously overshadowed by the phone. Newsgroups allowed people of common interests from all over the world to share information online.

But online life didn’t truly come of age until the invention of the Web. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist, created the original program in Geneva in 1989. It would allow for the organization and linking of pages in a network, referred to as a Web. People could easily surf this web with a web browser, like Mosiac of Netscape.

Web browsers quickly evolved from text-only to showing pictures and later audio and video. The Internet spilled out to the general population and became the biggest invention since television or radio before it.

It appeared to many at first that the Web would be a passing fad, but it began saving businesses expenditures, while opening new markets not yet realized. The Internet soon became an essential tool for business.

By empowering people to publish their own content to a worldwide audience, the Web decentralized the media, and even culture itself.

This was first evident in the publishing and newspaper industry. One did not need to go through a publishing house filter or editor to get a message out to the masses.

Matt Drudge of the DrudgeReport.com was a prime example of one man with a Web page publishing to the world.

Drudge became famous after publishing the first piece of what would become the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. It didn’t take long for it to reach every media outlet everywhere.

A glance at Drudge’s website today often foretells what stories dominate the mainstream media tomorrow.

Amid all the optimism of this emerging digital world, there was also apprehension.

Some feared the Web would make radio, TV and print obsolete, but it actually gave old media a new angle:

• The encyclopedia Britannica didn’t become outdated, it went online.

• Radio didn’t become obsolete, it expanded its reach worldwide online and via satellite

•  The Wall Street Journal and New York Times didn’t fold, they created lucrative online editions.

•  Books and magazines didn’t go out of style, they flourished online in the form of e-books and e-zines, inspiring and reinventing established print magazines.

Surround sound DVDs began streaming through broadband connections. With pay-per-view and i-Tunes, viewers can rent a movie or buy a CD without a trip to the store, without even a plastic case to hold it.

With virtual reality games, people are submersing existence intself into the digital, like characters in the sci-fi movie Tron: digital representations of the self.

The Old Testament talks about man as created in God’s likeness. As we reinvent our likeness, will we lose the original?