How The Internet Changed Everything

[Music] In August 1962, JCR Licklider proposed a new but monumental idea: computers that could talk to one another. A simple idea, but one whose implications resulted in a world-changing network. The first message sent over the Internet, which at this time was called the ARPANET, was sent from UCLA to Stanford in 1969. Their goal was just to try and find a way to make computing power more efficient.

During this time, computers were basically huge machines called mainframes that sat in rooms of buildings, doing nothing but handling one task at a time. The ARPANET planned to connect these mainframes to create multiple streams of processing power to improve research. The idea of the Internet at this point was for science. The first message sent was "login," and it worked – kind of. The computer at Stanford only received the L and the O before the system crashed, but it worked, and it changed everything.

The shift from newspapers to radio was barely anything when compared to the transition from radio to television. You could now finally see and hear people from parts of the world that you had never seen before. You were finally able to attach a look and a personality to the entertainment you were receiving. Almost immediately, the world became connected in a way that was never before imagined. TV changed the way we entertained ourselves and our families; however, the Internet, as we know it, changed the world in ways that make the past 2,000 years of work and technological advancement look like baby steps.

Take this for example: in 1860, the absolute fastest way to get a piece of mail from one side of the country to the other was by horse. Riders could deliver a letter from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, over 2,000 miles away in only 10 days. Take that time, double it, and you'll have your average time it would have taken to get a message across the country and back – almost three weeks. Today, however, you could send hundreds of thousands of times that amount of information to someone in literally a second.

But how did we get here? So imagine it's the early 1970s; there are a bunch of these huge computers in multiple places, yet they really can't communicate. There are different software and things that make talking to one another through these networks almost impossible until TCP/IP comes in, and this changes everything. It's the foundation of how every computer talks to one another today. TCP/IP allows data to be chopped up into what we call packets, sent from one place to another, and regardless of how it gets there, it'll display the same information on the other side.

Using TCP/IP, computers could talk to one another. So, this can be considered the beginning of the Internet, except it isn't the same Internet as we know it today. In the 1970s, most traffic across the Internet was just email until Tim Berners-Lee came in. He saw a way of being able to store information and data on the Internet. At this time, the Internet was just full of basically Google Docs full of text information; it was boring. But Tim Berners-Lee created something that allowed for people anywhere to share any and all information they had through separate pages, with a specific location to be found.

If it sounds like a book, it kind of is. Books are like webs of information; you can reference certain pages, the chapters go back and forth, all you want, whatever, just like you can now do on the Internet. The year is 1991, and Tim Berners-Lee had just created what we know today as the World Wide Web, and the connectivity begins to explode. More and more things are being connected to the Internet. Sure, there's millions of new people each year who gain access to the Internet. The things that used to be average items are now being connected to the Internet. Every phone sold today has some sort of access to the Internet. Smartwatches are now a thing. Refrigerators, for some reason, are able to connect to the Internet, so our washers and dryers and blenders.

It's like, do you really need an app for that? But regardless, it makes life easier in many ways. For me, this video is kind of personal in a way. I'm making a video about how the Internet changed everything, and for me, it really did. I wouldn't be in the position I am today without the Internet. Without the ability for me to communicate with you the way we do today, without the far reaches of the Internet, communication on this scale would be literally impossible. Every minute, 300 hours of footage is uploaded to YouTube, over 500,000 Snapchats are sent, 500,000 Facebook comments posted every day, 600 million people used Instagram, with over ninety-five million photos posted every year. Over six billion dollars are spent just maintaining YouTube, the platform that supports hundreds of thousands of people's careers. And this is just one corner of the Internet.

Every year, the Internet gets larger and larger as the amount of information increases drastically. Web traffic is at its highest it's ever been, and there's not much of a reason for it to slow down. The Internet gives you a way of feeling at home with people from other parts of the world. News has also been affected in a huge way; news spreads much, much faster. To be honest, I figure out most of my news on Twitter or YouTube before I see it on a traditional source of media.

Again, the importance of information in the blink of an eye. The Internet gave leverage to the spread of information. Traditional news sources needed time to get their stories out. For example, newspapers wouldn't get some stories until days or weeks after they occurred, depending on the location. Today, you could see firsthand views and stories from people who experience these events. Of course, not everything you see online is true, and with the Internet getting better and better at faking things, it's hard to tell real from fake.

In 2013, Facebook decided it wanted to give everyone in the world Internet in countries or places that didn't have the Internet. Facebook would provide it, but Facebook's Internet was a bit different; they only allowed access to Facebook, as well as a certain number of hand-picked websites that they figured were worthy of access. The thing is, when asked, these people still said they didn't have access to the Internet, but they had access to and spent hours on Facebook. For them, it seemed that the Internet, as we know it, wasn't real, but Facebook was and is the Internet.

Nigeria was the first country to launch 80 pre-selected websites for free with Airtel Africa, the country's second largest mobile provider. Facebook was offering Nigerians, over 90 million people, the opportunity to access news, health information, and services for free. It sounds good, but it isn’t. Seeing as how big the Internet is, there's always someone or something trying to take it away from you. With the recent news about net neutrality votes, your Internet use and freedom is at stake every time. This example with Facebook is exactly what net neutrality isn't. Facebook was choosing specific sites to allow access to, but as we know it today, the Internet is a seemingly endless pool of weird, cool, and confusing things. If there's something you want to find, someone somewhere on the Internet has it.

But with this, it's restricted, and that is the beginning of the end of the Internet, as we know it. People complain and say that phones, computers, and the Internet have ruined us, that we don't actually talk to one another anymore, but this couldn't be further from the truth. I mean, anytime you see someone on their phone in public, there's an extremely high chance that all they're doing is connecting with other people: text messages, Twitter, email, YouTube. We talk now more than ever and much, much louder. The Internet has literally almost connected you to any person you could think of. It takes only three to four people to connect you to any other person on the planet: me, celebrities, the president, any YouTuber, or streamer—just three to four of the right people separate you from them.

Freedom of speech and anonymity go hand in hand. You cannot have one without the other. The Internet gives people a place to express their real thoughts without fear of peer pressure or fear of being persecuted for saying the wrong thing. This has let people's true colors show, and it's not always sunshine and rainbows on the Internet. Just like when television became popular, things that were previously never-before-seen now had light being shed on them. Take the Vietnam War for example; people could finally see the terrors of war and what was being done.

It made things real, and that changed a lot. If we want something like the Internet to work, something on that big of a scale, we have to leave it open to everyone, not restricted. It's made us the most efficient we've ever been, but it's also made us the laziest we've ever been. Of course, with being connected to every person in the world, it comes with its downsides. Every day you see tons of people who put on a show for social media, seeing Instagram and other sites as a highlight reel, and that sucks.

Here's why it's not real: yes, I see your new car; no, I don't care how much money you made last month. The Internet has given everyone a voice; and now, the majority of people use it to show off what they spent their last paycheck on. This has unfortunately given a false image of success to many people. With all the good opportunities that the Internet provides, there are more people obsessed with looking successful as opposed to actually being successful. This is a good thing, actually; it exposes the people who fake it while promoting the people who succeed.

Just as civilizations did tens of thousands of years ago, communities form. You form groups with like-minded people, but it's not all bad. The Internet has given us connectivity, online shopping, research, social media, cloud storage, cultural exposure, viral content, just instant information about anything. There's so much stuff on the Internet, most of it you don't even know exists. The more you use it, the better you understand the impact it has. If you want something, whether it be a service or product, legal or illegal, immoral or unethical, the Internet has it. You can choose to use this for good or bad.

The thing with the Internet is that you can't get rid of it anymore; it's ingrained in everyday lifestyles. It's become a place where anyone from anywhere can connect with people like themselves. Of course, the Internet is obviously not full of the greatest people. In order for the Internet to work the way it does, it has to allow everyone, both good and bad, equal use of the Internet. This includes both surface web normies as well as dark web drug and human traffickers. It's both the best and somehow the worst thing to happen to the world. It's helped to both create and destroy careers.

In just over 50 years, the Internet went from being an idea, a spark in someone's mind, to completely dominating our society as it is today. From the first two letters sent into a network that connects over half of the global population today, as of June 2018, fifty-five point one percent of the world's population has Internet access, and this number is growing each year by hundreds of millions of people. The Internet has gone from huge clunky machines that could hardly handle a basic message to small devices that you can wear on your wrist or fit in your pocket. The speeds at which we communicate are speeding up.

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