The Information Age: Internet and Mass Media - Essay Example

The history of internet can be traced back to the launch and orbit of Sputnik I in 1957. This historical event sent scientific and psychological shock waves in the science policy community as well as throughout American politics and the American public (Russell, 2001). Based on this, President Eisenhower created an agency known as Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA later known as DARPA) which would be responsible for coordinating advanced, high-risk research that could lead to technological breakthroughs for the military at the height of cold war.

The scientists feared that the government either misused or misunderstood modern science and technology, and hence the ARPA. After the successful use of computers as batch processing number-crunchers and working with people in real time to solve complex problems (Russell, 2001), it was then visualized that visualized that computers should facilitate communication between people and be a support for human decision process (Spilling & Lundh, 2004). Traveling through different stages of development, a stable and mature internet technology was developed and in 1980 TCP/IP.

Soon there was a widespread development of LANs, PCs and workstations. Hosts were assigned names so that people could work easily on the internet. As the number of users increased, the number of hosts had to be increased. As the users further increased, Domain Name Systems (DNS) was invented by Paul Mockapetris (Leiner et al., 1999). Gradually as interconnection improved, electronic mails or emails became a regular phenomenon and by 1990 ARPANET was finally decommissioned and internet was here to stay.

The World Wide Web or simply WWW was established which replaced the hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP) as WWW was more user friendly, easily navigable, it could link data objects, be they text or graphics. Today WWW is the most popular form of information technology which has shrunk the