Not just another pencil: Computer-mediated communication from a senior's point of view.
Chapter II The World Wide Web
Who, what, when, where, and why did they do it, and how does this affect the lives of our senior citizens today?
The advent of the World Wide Web was fortuitous for our generation, and because of our avid use, became a potentially valuable resource for generations to come. That, of course, presupposes immortality in the e-world, which is the subject of my final chapter.
In 1945, just before atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dr. Vannevar Bush, U.S. Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, published his remarkable article "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly.
Dr. Bush had coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the science of waging war. "As We May Think" was a proposal for these scientists to take on the task of making more accessible their bewildering store of knowledge for non-war purposes.
For years inventions had extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind and Dr. Bush believed that instruments were at hand which could be developed to give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. He proposed linking all the world's libraries with all the world's knowledge via a system he called Memex, which could not exist with the technology of 1945 but which inspired the future creators of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Twenty years later, in the doomsday, cold war atmosphere of 1964, when the world had discovered what an atomic bomb could do to a civilization, a think tank in California came up with a scheme for diffused communication. The system to be developed must not rely on one central place, which would become a target. If command posts were ever wiped out and every conventional means of contact were disabled, a network would survive only if there could be no central control that a nuclear explosion might attack.
Secrecy shrouded the deliberations of the RAND Corporation created by the U.S. Air Force. Paul Baran was credited with the notion of establishing a computer based network which could operate without a central authority. Every part of the network would be equal in status to all others, each with its own authority to originate, transfer and receive messages. To ensure security, messages were divided into sections with each section addressed separately. Routing was to be random, point to point, messages eventually finding their intended destinations. If part of the network were annihilated, presumably by nuclear attack, the message sections would still proceed helter skelter through the surviving parts of the network.
By 1968 the National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain had built a test network which was then expanded by the Pentagon¹s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Called ARPANET, it consisted of four computers that could transfer data on dedicated high-speed transmission lines, programmed remotely so computer facilities could be shared by long-distance.
ARPANET grew quickly. In 1972 researchers were using 37 destinations to collaborate on projects and also to socialize, with personal user accounts, personal e-mail addresses and mailing lists for bulk e-mailing amongst the insiders. Thus was born, unintentionally, the system of electronic mail, which has become the Internet's by far most important application. Development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP, developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. This new protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other.
As the danger of nuclear war lessened, this mysteriously anarchical method of communication metamorphosed into today¹s Internet. Computers became, as early developers loved to call them, user friendly. As more and more people hooked into the system it became more and more useful. Electronic mail (e-mail) soon overcame snail mail, the term Internet advocates adopted to depict the traditional postal system.
Domains were established to help users find their way around the Internet. These were composed of easily remembered letters to replace the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which are strings of digits like a long telephone number.
Business, governments, universities, the military all adopted the system and then came Tim Berners-Lee.
One might imagine that the World Wide Web had evolved over time while people were becoming accustomed to the Internet, the product of collaborating researchers in universities or scientific laboratories. It could be supposed that whoever invented the system we now all use would have made a fortune from his invention. As it happened, though, one man chose the expression, World Wide Web, invented the hypertext markup language called HTML, and gave them freely to us all.
Tim Berners-Lee was born in London, England, in 1955, the son of mathematicians. His mother and father were part of the team that programmed the commercial stored-program computer, the Manchester University 'Mark I,' in the early 1950s. As a boy, Tim was already excited about the idea that computers could become much more powerful if they could be programmed to link otherwise unconnected information.
In 1976 Berners-Lee graduated in Physics from Oxford. Four years later he was a consultant software engineer at CERN. Variously known as Conseil, Centre and Organisation Européén pour la Recherche Nucléaire in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is now the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, where physicists from all over the world collaborate on complex physics, engineering and information handling projects. The computer program that Berners-Lee wrote for storing his own information was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a Web of hypertext documents.
In 1990 Berners-Lee wrote and named the first World Wide Web server and the first hypertext browser, all of which was made available to the world on the Internet the following summer.
Berners-Lee began receiving feedback from Internet users and refined versions were launched in 1994 with the founding of his World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Now a senior research scientist at the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT, he is still transforming the system to keep up with the evolution of its usage. In his book "Weaving the Web" published by Harper¹s, he explains his vision.
"The vision I have for the Web is about anything being potentially connected with anything. It is a vision that provides us with new freedom, and allows us to grow faster than we ever could. . . . it brings the workings of society closer to the workings of our minds."
It is also stated on the cover of his book that his vision of the Web is something much more than a tool for research or communication. It is a new way of thinking and a means to freedom and social growth.
His creation changed the way people do business, entertain themselves, exchange ideas, and socialize with one another. With new online businesses and communities forming every day, the full impact of Berners-Lee's grand scheme has yet to be fully known.
The World Wide Web, as a component of the Internet, came into prominence when the National centre for Super Computing Applications (NCSCA) research team invented Mosaic, the first graphical browser. This made interactivity easy, and allowed the use of still pictures, moving pictures, animations and later sound, all of which was not possible with text-browsers like Lynx.
In 1994 Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina, the team who had designed Mosaic, left NCSCA to inaugurate the popular Netscape browser in Mountain View, California, enabling everyone, not only academics and engineers, to use the Internet.
Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Paul Baran, Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreesen and their many collaborators, working in academic environments, may not have realized what a difference their products would make in the lives of a growing senior population which has come to feel at home on the World Wide Web.
The symbiotic relationship between seniors and the Internet dispels any misconception that cyberspace is youth-specific. As computers interact between offices around the world, in schools, universities, and children's bedrooms, parents apprehend perceived dangers while grandparents are comfortably molding their own cyberspace to ever-widening usefulness in the Internet community.
The major downside of Internet use, according to seniors surveyed, was the high cost. To counteract the cost problem, libraries and senior citizens centres increasingly provide computers for public use, along with instructors to help beginners, while acquiring one's own computer has become a popular retirement project.
The value of Internet availability to senior citizens, however, has not always been appreciated. In my 70s, I was a volunteer computer teacher for several years in one of Ottawa's largest senior centres, but the management would not allow the senior computer class access to a phone line. This meant that my students could only learn to use the computers as word processors, but could not explore the Internet. It was not the elders who resisted modernization but the younger people, presumably trained in social work, but still with a stereotyped view of the elderly.
To gain a voice at the centre I got myself elected to the executive, and subsequently became members' president with a seat on their Board of Directors. I built them a Web site and got e-mail connections to the outside world for the staff, but they were still determined that none of us seniors would be permitted to use the Internet from the centre, a serious frustration for my computer classes. I left the senior centre and went to Toronto to teach Journalism at Ryerson University, a far more rewarding endeavour.
Traps and pitfalls on the Internet being no more onerous than those everywhere else in this dangerous world, old folks who have overcome calamity in all its forms for generations are prepared to go fearlessly forward into cyberspace. Awareness and precaution always on their minds, they are well able to make best use of the medium without letting themselves become prey to its predators.
Addiction has been cited as one of the dangers of this computer age. According to a survey from Websense, one in every four employees surveyed in the US is addicted to the Internet. This, of course, would depend on one¹s definition of addiction. Employers responding to a poll could deem their staff to be addicted, whereas the Internet-using employees might think otherwise.
In France, according to a survey from the Benchmark Group, 23 per cent of employees use the Internet for personal use for an hour each day, while at work. The US report found that employees spend more than one entire workday each week accessing non-work-related Web sites, the most addictive being shopping, news, pornography, gambling and auction sites.
Employers have means to block employee access to any of these sites, but this entire topic bears little on seniors. If retired people use the Internet a great deal of the time it could be called an addiction but it is more likely a habit, a hobby, or that they are simply interested.
Inappropriate use of the Internet at work has caused dismissal in many cases, but this is still not a problem for seniors using the Internet at their own leisure, in their own homes.
Next to addiction, among the fears of the wary, is the crime of spreading hate on the Internet. The BBC Online Network reports that the number of Web sites promoting violence and racism has risen dramatically since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, according to a study published by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
There were 3,300 Œproblematic¹ Web sites in existence in 2002, up from 2,600 in 2001. Web sites supporting suicide bombers had increased to around 100 since September 11, 2001. As with every site on the World Wide Web, these can be found by anyone, and also can be ignored by anyone.
Racist and violent groups continue to proliferate. They are spreading their messages with games and music and the Internet is being used to create alliances between different groups who have common hatreds. White supremacists and Islamic extremists are linking up. Whether this use of the Internet attracts seniors is a personal matter.
As the World Wide Web permits and encourages the spread of the wisdom of the elderly, it also provides a platform for their prejudices. Some of our seniors grew up in an era when anti-Semitism and xenophobia were common and were not condemnable. This could cause concern that their presence in the WWW family would encourage, or even possibly engender more hate sites. There is no evidence of this happening but it must be recognized as a possibility.
Wall Street Online, now called the Pristine Day Trader, is not necessarily a menace, though for some its accessibility could be considered dangerous. There is no clear age distinction among those who trade stocks online, but the over all number is growing apace and it can be assumed that many of these are elderly.
Study, recreation and e-mail are more often the preoccupations of older users. According to a study from the Age Concern, in Britain, most men aged 55 or over go online to search for information or to pursue their hobbies, while most women in the same age category prefer to use the Internet to communicate with close friends and family.
Only when these times become history will the full effect of the Internet on this generation be reckoned. Meanwhile, old folks around the planet who feel right at home on the World Wide Web are enthusiastic about their computers.
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