HISTORY OF THE INTERNET

A QUICK HISTORY OF THE INTERNET


When we entered the period of industrialization then the age of electricity over 200 years ago, the pace of communication greatly improved. Various innovations came about, revolutionizing the way people communicated. Some of them were film (1890s), radio (1895), and television (1927).

The Idea for the Internet began with the invention of computers in the 1960s. Scientist were looking for ways to link computers in the US and Europe so information can be quickly shared for defense and scientific purposes. In the 1980s, British computer scientist Time Berners-Lee conducted a research at CERN (Switzerland) which later resulted in the invention of the World Wide Web. And since the mid-1990s, the Internet has become a fixture of any modern society. In the summer of 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council released a non-binding document condemning the international disruption of Internet access by governments. This followed the 2011 report by Frank LaRue, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and the expression, that Internet access is a fundamental right.

The Internet has increased the power and reach of mass media. We have now entered the Information Age. Information is abundant and is spread instantaneously and inexpensively throughout the world. Its growth hasn’t stopped-in fact, it is exponentially growing and changing, quickening the ways we communicate, bringing new challenges to how media shapes society.

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