What is the Internet?

VideoJug: Internet Basics

Internet Basics

What is the "Internet"?

Nobody knows what the internet is. Certainly nobody knows what the internet is anymore, because it's constantly, constantly changing. It is technically, officially an interconnected series of worldwide computers that allow for an exchange of all kinds of information, an emails, and protocols, video and graphics, but one of the key fundamentals in the history of the internet is that it was designed during the cold war, it was partly a response to Sputnik, and all of a sudden the department of defense and the United States government freaked out and the Advanced Research Projects Agency was founded, quickly made a part of the Department of Defense, and one of the initial origins for this network had to do with how would we decentralize communications in the event of a nuclear attack. How could the communications infrastructure reside and be contained in multiple locations, so that no one centralized place could be knocked out, and that was one of the fundamental concept behind the origins of what then became the internet, but this evolved through several academic and technological and government projects, and gradually grew into the internet we now have today, along the way, different things got standardized, packet switching and different kinds of communication protocols, until eventually what we have now is servers and computers, and hosts that exist all over the world, there is no, there is no one place where we can grab the internet, it's now become this technological expression of mass conscientious and information.

What can I do on the Internet?

What do you want to do on the internet? Asking what you can do on the internet is like asking “what can I spell with the alphabet?” You can surf for websites, look up movie show times, find out the weather anywhere in the world, see pictures of your house from outer space. You can also rent movies, read reviews on movies, find out who is in a particular movie and you can listen to music, buy music, explore new artists. You can meet friends, you can meet enemies, you can have conversations, you can have monologues, you can send photographs and movies. You can even share your life or you could find ways to hide your life.

Source: Videojug