Gizmos or: The Electronic Imperative

How Digital Devices have Transformed American Character and Culture

Arthur Asa Berger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137575265
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137565457
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Gizmos or: The Electronic Imperative offers a concise series of analyses on the transformative impact of digital devices on American society. With approaches ranging from semiotic theory to psychoanalytic theory, sociological theory to personal reflection, Berger taps the span of knowledge from his prolific career to help readers better understand the role digital devices play both in their technologic, economic, and common-use forms. Using accessible, conversational language and numerous illustrations, Berger deconstructs familiar objects and media for readers ranging from field specialists to everyday cultural consumers alike.

1

The Internet: Everyone Is Connected

Abstract: This chapter offers a definition of the Internet (of which there are many), a timeline on the development the Internet and devices that make use of it, and of various sociocultural issues connected with the Internet, such as the problem of privacy in the Internet age, the social problem of bullying by people using the Internet, and the impact the Internet has had on our psyches—especially in relation to loneliness and isolation that afflict many people. It also deals with addiction to video games and the forthcoming “Internet of Things,” in which all of our digital devices will be connected to one another and can be operated with our smartphones.

Berger, Arthur Asa. Gizmos or: The Electronic Imperative: How Digital Devices have Transformed American Character and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137565457.0008.

I begin with two quotations that offer different perspectives on the role that the Internet plays in our lives and the impact the Internet has had on our societies and cultures. You can decide, as you read this book, which interpretation makes most sense to you. The first quotation is by Howard Rheingold, and is taken from his book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.

Mass collaboration has transformed not only the way people use the Internet but also how information is found (Google’s PageRank), knowledge is aggregated (Wikipedia), science is conducted (citizen science), software is created (social production of the free Linux operating system and Firefox, the second most popular Web browser), computing power is harnessed for research (distributed computation), people are entertained (massive multiplayer online games), problems are solved (collective intelligence), news is gathered (citizen journalism), disaster relief is delivered (crisis mapping and emergent collective response), communities are formed (virtual communities), and commercial products are designed and tested (crowdsourcing). It isn’t easy to think of a realm of human behavior that has not been influenced in some way by some form of mass collaboration.

Howard Rheingold, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.

The second is by a philosopher, Herbert Dreyfus, and comes from his book On the Internet. He is much more critical than Rheingold is about the impact of the Internet on our lives, our relationships with our families and related concerns.

The research examined the social and psychological impact of the Internet on 169 people in seventy-three households during their first one or two years online . . . .In this sample, the Internet was used extensively for communication. Nonetheless, the greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in participants’ communication with family members in the household, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in depression and loneliness . . . .On-line friendships are likely to be more limited than friendships supported by physical proximity . . . .Because on-line friends are not embedded in the same day-to-day environment, they will be less likely to understand the context for conversation, making discussion more difficult and rendering support less applicable.

Even strong ties maintained at a distance through electronic communication are likely to be different in kind and perhaps diminished in strength compared with strong ties supported by physical proximity. The interpersonal communication applications currently prevalent on the Internet are either neutral toward strong ties or tend to undercut them rather than promote them.

I was thirty-six years old when the Internet first began, in a primitive way, as a result of an initiative by the United States Government’s ARPA—Advanced Research Projects Agency—and I was sixty-five when Google was created. Unlike my children and grandchildren, I did not grow up with the Internet and all the digital gizmos—the subject of this book—that make use of it and digital technology. I bought my first computer, a Commodore 64, in 1982 (if I recall correctly) for $600, which means I can be classified as an “early adopter” of computers. It enabled me to do very primitive word processing, but once I learned how to use the computer for word processing I began buying more powerful computers—ones that could use other programs such as Word Perfect and then various iterations of Microsoft Word.

My Gizmos

This book is being typed on a Dell Inspiron computer with Windows 8.1. I am using Word 2013. I have, in addition to the gizmos I listed earlier, a WD external hard disk, and a Sharp Fax machine. As I explained earlier, I have many gizmos: I have an AT&T modem/router for our Wi-Fi. I’ve had a succession of cheap cell phones over the past ten or fifteen years and finally was tempted by the incredible capacities of smartphones and purchased a smartphone, a Google Nexus 4. Having written about smartphones, I decided, finally, to get one. It is an amazing device, with apps that can count how many steps I’ve taken and others that I can use to photograph checks so I can deposit them directly, over the Internet. Recently our daughter gave us three Vtech telephones so now we have four regular telephones and three Vtech telephones in the house. In many rooms we now have two telephones: a traditional landline and a Vtech portable telephone.

For a number of years I used Netgear’s technical computer support, which was done by phone using 800 numbers to call India. Netgear has a program, Bomgar, which enables technicians in India to take control of a computer and make repairs. But I switched to Microsoft technical support, in part because they have a Microsoft store near where I live, which means I don’t have to wait to be connected to a Netgear technician in India. The technicians were excellent but in recent months it took almost an hour to get connected to one. I got tired of the long waits on the phone (originally you’d be connected very quickly) so I decided to use Microsoft’s computer repair service.

It is the Internet (some spell it with a small “i” as the internet) that is central to the creation of many, if not most, of the fantastic digital electronic devices that play such a large role in our lives nowadays. I’ve always felt there is some kind of an imperative connected with the digital gizmos we use. Is there some kind of a connection between the electricity in our brains and our digital gizmos that helps explain why we become so involved with them? In this chapter, I will deal with the Internet and its impact on our psyches, societies, and cultures. The Pew Research Trust reports that in 2000, 52% of adults used the Internet. For 2015, the figure is 84%, a considerable increase. For more details, see Pew Research, July 02, 2015.

The electronic imperative

I have suggested earlier that there is an electronic imperative that plays a role that we may not be aware of in our daily lives. I believe that the creation of the Internet marks a turning point in human history, so we can say life that existed before the Internet had a certain quality but our lives after the Internet are radically different from what they were before the Internet.

Virginia Woolf described a similarly important change in 1924, at a lecture she gave at the Heretics Club at Cambridge University in 1924. She said:

On or about December, 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not like that. But a change there was, nevertheless, and since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910 . . . When human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.

Woolf argued that after December 1910 (or around then) life in England had changed in major ways—a change that she noticed in the relationships between husbands and wives, masters and servants, children and parents, and the kind of literature that was being written. Scholars have described this change as the advent of modernism.

We can make a similar statement about the invention of the Internet and suggest that “On or about December 1983, when the Internet was invented, human society and culture changed.” There is some question about when the Internet actually came into being but I will take 1983 as the date. A year or two, one way or another, doesn’t really matter. What is important is that after the Internet was invented, life changed in remarkable ways. I will deal with the smartphone, the most revolutionary and important device that uses the Internet, shortly. After I try to define the Internet.

Let me begin with a quotation that answers the question “What is the Internet?” After that, I will offer timeline that lists some of the major points in the creation and evolution of the Internet. Then I will discuss its impact.

What is the Internet?

I got this description of the Internet from a site on the Internet, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/internet. Here is the description they offered:

Publicly accessible computer NETWORK connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET’s purpose was to conduct research into computer networking in order to provide a secure and survivable communications system in case of war. As the network quickly expanded, academics and researchers in other fields began to use it as well. In 1971 the first program for sending E-MAIL over a distributed network was developed; by 1973, the year international connections to ARPANET were made (from Britain and Norway), e-mail represented most of the traffic on ARPANET. The 1970s also saw the development of mailing lists, NEWSGROUPS and BULLETIN-BOARD SYSTEMS, and the TCP/IP communications PROTOCOLS, which were adopted as standard protocols for ARPANET in 1982–1983, leading to the widespread use of the term Internet. In 1984 the DOMAIN NAME addressing system was introduced. In 1986 the National Science Foundation established the NSFNET, a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic, and within a year more than 10,000 hosts were connected to the Internet. In 1988 real-time conversation over the network became possible with the development of Internet Relay Chat protocols (see CHAT). In 1990 ARPANET ceased to exist, leaving behind the NSFNET, and the first commercial dial-up access to the Internet became available. In 1991, the World was released to the public (via FTP). The Mosaic BROWSER was released in 1993, and its popularity led to the proliferation of World Wide Web sites and users.

This description/definition also offers some interesting historical information about the development of the Internet. In essence, the Internet is a vast network that links smaller computer networks that can transmit words, sounds, and images in a bewildering number of programs.

Timeline on the Internet

This timeline is based on a number of different timelines available on the Internet, some of which are very long and detailed and others of which are short and lack detail. I’ve put some of them together in the timeline that follows.

1822		Computer prototype developed by Charles Babbage
1939		First modern computer designed by John Vincent Atanasoff at Iowa State University
1951		UNIVAC, first civilian computer created by Eckert and Mauchly
1969		ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) connects four major US universities in December
1972		Pong, the first video game, created
1972		Electronic mail introduced by Ray Tomlinson who uses the @ to distinguish between the sender’s name and network name in the email address
1973		Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
1978		Cellular phone service starts
1982		The word “Internet” is first used
1984		Domain Name System (DNS) created. Network addresses identified by extensions such as .com, .org, and .edu
1984		Writer William Gibson coins the Term “cyberspace”.
1984		Apple Macintosh computer introduced
1983		TCP/IP becomes standard. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) developed so users can download files from a different computer
1985		America Online, debuts, offers email, electronic bulletin boards, news, and other information
1988		Internet Worm virus shuts down about 10% of the world’s Internet servers
1989		Tim Berners-Lee of CERN (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Why I Decided to Write This Book
• 1  The Internet: Everyone Is Connected
• 2  Smartphones: Everyone Can Do Anything
• 3  Television: Everyones Watching
• 4  Tablet Computers: Everyones a God
• 5  Computers: Everyones a Writer
• 6  Video Game Consoles and Video Games: Everyones a Hero
• 7  Digital Watches and Smart Watches: Everyones Monitored
• 8  Digital Cameras and Photography: Everyones a Documentary Maker
• 9  Computer Printers: Everyones a Publisher
• 10  Flatbed Computer Scanners: Everyones an Art Director
• Coda
• References
• Index