How the Web Was Won - MMLit

           Before reading this article my knowledge of how the internet was created and formed was basically Al Gore. I was reading and I kept wondering when does Gore show up, isn't he always saying he invented the internet.  Finally he showed up and to my surprise he really didn't do much, that's not to say what he did wasn't important, but he definitely wasn't as involved as I thought he was.  I mean funding could have come from anywhere when you really think about it.
           The article itself actually turned out to be a lot more interesting than I had originally expected.  I think most of the interest had to do with the way the material was presented, a series of interviews presenting different views from different people all involved in the creation of the internet.  It definitely made the information more accessible instead of just reading a journalist's rendering of all of these interviews.
            It's surprising to think about how much use everyone gets out of the internet but how little we actually know about it.  It's more like this magical network that does what we ask without question and if it doesn't question us why should we question it.  So we get this story filled with competition, with AT&T being the unlikely antagonist, and a sense that the people involved knew that what they were doing was going to be big but no one else did.  The best way it's described is by Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science at UCLA.  He talks about the major accomplishments of 1969 and how with everything that happened that year the last thing anyone was thinking about was the birth of the internet.
            The article goes on to discuss all of the recent innovations that deal with the internet and how it's always changing and improving.  The internet provides us with more than we actually need, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  Politics, music, games, the list goes on and on.  I took a class called Media, Power, and Culture last semester and a good majority of that class was spent discussing the impact of the internet and how over the years it has changed our way of life.  The internet cannot be ignored and knowing the history of it might just shed some light on the magic of it.