↑ W ↑
← A ← ↓ S ↓ → D → anddd use your mouse
To move around this experience! You'll never want to leave ;)
Click any gif on the page before the computer fully loads to unlock audio! Do so at your own peril.
See if you can find each evolutionary step in order. After all, you can always refresh and start over. Good luck, and farewell. Try not to get trapped in so easily, your body gets tired the more active your mind is. The ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), was the first public computer network - specifically designed for researchers/ scientists/ academics to share information and collaborate on research projects. Established in 1969, its lifespan of 20 years saw the first glimpses of an information-based society, and exploration of how technology could work with us as well as for us.
Additionally, it is widely argued that January 1st 1983 is the birthday of the Internet as it was the moment standardised communication between multiple people globally (and at such a large scale) was made, well, public enough for mass consumers to join in on the fun! It is no surprise that the 1990s saw the Internet burst into the scene with with World Wide Web [created in 1989] gaining traction as the first mass-user friendly interface for accessing information. Thus ending the need to be tech-literate to be online. Enter, the start of the end. The WWW also led to an explosion of websites made by whoever and all over. Additionally, the advent of search engines like Yahoo! and Google meant for the first time, users can pinpoint the information they wanted as well as find something completely new and unexpected.
However, we must also be aware of the rules of the Wild West that was early Internet. Did you know there was several ways of retrieving information online? Even in its early days, there were separate software applications to access the Internet with protocols such as for file retrieval, file transfer, and Gopher - which offered downloadable files alongside content description. Bet it was fun sorting out through every single file you’d need, and then waiting for permission to access it! The vast amount of information available on the Internet can be dizzying. Some authorities estimate the number of documents on the Internet to be in the range of 800 million. Search engines collect information from Web sites and then, more or less, just dump that information into a database. There's more information to choose from in a search engine, but it's more difficult to retrieve relevant information.
Search directories try to impose some sense of order on the information they collect and you're more likely to find information relevant to your research topic, but they don't offer the massive amounts of information that you would find with a search engine. The sites collected are viewed by humans who make decisions about what subject categories the sites might fit into. There are hundreds of these search engines available on the Web, but they all work in unique ways to collect and organise the information found. The information from Web sites might be gathered from all the words in a site, just the first few sentences in the body of a site, or only from the title or metatags (hidden descriptors of a site's content). Different search engines collect different information, that's why you'll get different results from the same search from different search engines.
The new century also brought a surge of creativity as the early 2000s saw some of the very first social media platforms and sites. With the launch of Friendster in 2002, MySpace and Facebook are just some of those that paved the way for consumer culture and the fast-paced, no-nonsense infinite stream of personalised content that we all are used to, and love to have at our fingertips. These platforms allowed users to connect with each other and share information on a massive scale in a way that traditional forms of the Internet never had before. Enter Artificial Intelligence. The newest and shiniest advancement that is also open-source and free to use (to a certain extent) is AI aides who can generate anything you can ever think of! From University essays, to a never-ending parody version of Seinfeld, AI has meant to there never needs to be a reason to actually do anything yourself ever again. Despite some initial generations being less than useful, all you have to do to make quality videos, texts, images, and even voices is to sign up to every AI bot there is, hand over all your details including banking and personal emails, and constantly search specific prompts until you get exactly what you want! After all, you don’t want to be the only person who doesn’t understand how to not do anything yourself.
And now we’re more or less caught up! Who am I kidding, there’s probably been another thousand video uploads, five thousand images, and ten thousand captions written in the time it’s taken you to get to this point. So what are you doing? Hurry up, don’t miss out! You’re not hungry, or tired, your body is just holding you back. Surely there’s a way to become a cyborg by now, or maybe if you become more chronically online you’ll stay here, forever. Get comfy, this is going to be a long ride. So… did you manage to look through everything in time? Or did you get disoriented too fast? It’s okay! The Internet is here to help with every and all the problems you could every had. Just stay right here and it will come to you … eventually.
Now all you have to do is agree to the terms and conditions, and you can get everything at the low, low cost of, well, the true human experience. Because who wants a real life when you could have all this all the time.
