Technological Advances in Recent Years

¶ … Technological Advances in Recent Years - World Wide Web

This work will answer a series of questions beginning with the broad question: How do social, technological, and economic changes impact the individual? The overall question of the work is: What is one of the most important technological advances in recent years? The subtopic of the work is: The introduction of the World Wide Web. Finally, coming to a specific question about the subtopic: How did the introduction of the World Wide Web change the way individuals acquire and share information? The answer to this question will be found as a result of exploring the hypothesis: The introduction of the World Wide Web helped make the Internet so much easier to use and understand for the average person that it has become the most popular and widely used resource to search for and obtain information.

The World Wide Web, otherwise known as the internet began really with the invention of the computer, way back in 1962. The computer of 1962 looked and acted nothing like the computer of today as they took up inordinate amounts of space and processed information slowly and limitedly through amaze of complicated single line programming. Initially science and government agencies developed what was called ARPANET named for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense, who funded many aspects of the project was designed to help remote scientists access programs and information for research. This system of networks with a maximum processing speed of 50 Kbs in 1967, became what is now known as the internet or World Wide Web, through many years of development and eventually privatization. In 1981 IBM begins to market the first of its personal computers that are small enough for individual use, and in 1984 Apple markets the Macintosh personal computer. The introduction of these two elements plus the advances in communication over telephone line technology created exponential growth that began in science, then in industry and eventually in to the homes of individual users. By the late 1980s the growth of the system was so great that originators could not keep track of it in any substantive way and by 1992 the WWW.holdsa strong position as a technological phenomena that effects many millions of people a day in some substantive way;

The number of networks exceeds 7,500 and the number of computers connected passes 1,000,000....The challenge to the telephone network's dominance as the basis for communicating between people is seen for the first time; the Internet is no longer just for machines to talk to each other...The WWW.burstsinto the world and the growth of the Internet explodes like a supernova. What had been doubling each year, now doubles in three months. What began as an ARPA experiment has, in the span of just 30 years, become a part of the world's popular culture. (Computer History Museum "Internet History" 2006, NP)

It is safe to say that initially and even late into the 1990s the WWW.wasutilized by individuals as a tool for ease of work, and yet as it grew, began to offer video and voice technology transfer and additional capacity for traditional text information transfer it blossomed into an all encompassing source of information, offering everything from international personal communication to recipes for bunt cake or bombs. By the end of the 1990s electronic digital copies of previously laborious hard copy renditions of library data, entire books, archives of newspapers dating back to the 1920s began to appear on the internet, not to mention the capacity of search engines to link and find such information through simple text searches. Research was forever changed by remote viewing and data retrieval. (Pelton, 2000, p. 30)

The Internet has revolutionized the way we communicate, do business, socialize, and find entertainment. It has transformed work and has pervaded our leisure lives as well. And it has changed the way we educate. Not since the Industrial Revolution has society seen such an omnipresent technological advancement. We are teaching amidst a technological renaissance, with ideas flowing digitally at rapid speeds, traversing the globe, and changing our lives in the process. (Ross & Schulz, 1999, p. 123)

The value of communicating with stored information as well as individuals on the other side of the planet has become a pervasive aspect of the social fiber of the world, though their s still a divide that separates some from the system, it is safe to say that without the WWW.noone would even know the who, what and where needs of individuals missing this common link. (Aberg & Shahmehri, 2003, p. 287) the change has been so extreme that the WWW.nowspawns countless new ideas a day, as a result of information exchange and has even changed the fabric of our vocabularies, allowing concepts, words and phrases to become universally accepted aspects of language. (Forsythe, Grose, & Ratner, 1998, p. 12) in one expansive text on the manner in which the WWW.haschanged the pattern of individual literacy from local to global the authors describe their work, and in so doing explain the connectivity and extreme nature of change.

The chapters that comprise this volume describe literacies born of, and marked by, their particular cultural, linguistic, historical, and geographic roots in Hungary, Greece, Australia, Palau, Norway, Japan, Scotland, Mexico, Cuba, South Africa, and the United States, but the chapters also describe literacies that clearly transcend, deny, or resist these specific geopolitical locations by, and through, their presence on the Web. This dynamic tension between localness and globalness, takes us beyond the simple-if appealingly coherent and modernist-narrative of the global-village as described in the Introduction to this volume. The messy complexity -- and the oftentimes contradictory nature-of these new literacies suggests, instead, a more complicated postmodern vision. This new vision recognizes online literacy practices not only as responses to the disintegration of conventional world-views, world orders, and social formations based on a modernist framework, but also as an important primary means of creating and expressing identities in changing postmodern landscapes. (Hawisher & Selfe, 2000, pp. 277-278)