Impact of Internet Technology and its Management: A Case Study

Word count: 3696

Executive summary: Over the last few decades the internet has revolutionised our economy and society. It has become an essential component of everyday social and business life for billions of people around the globe. Since its birth in the early 1960s, the internet has been changing our lives to the point where the mankind stand today and our societies rely on it as a critical infrastructure. The internet has transformed from a purely academic network into a worldwide open infrastructure for information, communication and commerce. Wireless technology has taken everything a step further, making it possible to interact with the internet anywhere, anytime. This is continually expanding with the ever increasing connections of internet-enabled devices. The internet has become a powerful tool for creativity and innovation. The technology is rapidly spreading far and wide, especially with the broadband and mobile connectivity. In effect, this bang is likely to redefine the nature of internet and the fabric of social, cultural, political and economic institutions, worldwide in the near future. The next generation of the internet is going to have numerous socio-economic and environmental effects on modern society. So, there is a need for investigation on the impact of internet technology and its strategic management.

List of Abbreviations: .gov .org AOL ARPANET ASCII BBN BBS CERN DNS FreeBSD HTML HTTP IP IRC ISP IT MIT MUD NS OSI PC RIA SSL TCP/IP UCLA URL VOIP government organization America OnLine Advanced Research Project Agency Network American Standard Code of Information Interchange Bolt,Beranek,Newman Bulletin Borad System Centre de Reseau Nucleare Domain Name Serrver Free Barkeley Software Distribution Hyper Text Markup Language Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Internet Protocol Internet Relay Chat Internet Service Provider Information Technology Massachusetts Institute of Technology MultiUser Dungeon Name Server Open System Interconnection Personal Computer Rich Internet Application Secure Socket Layer Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol University of California Los Angeles Universal Resource Locator Voice Over Internet Protocol

Table of contents
1. 2. 3. Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1 History of the Internet- a timeline .................................................................................................. 2 Impact of internet technology ........................................................................................................ 4 3.1 3.2 3.3 4. 5. Environmental impact of internet .......................................................................................... 4 Social impacts of internet ....................................................................................................... 4 Economic impact of internet technology................................................................................ 5

Management of internet technology.............................................................................................. 6 Future of internet technology ......................................................................................................... 7

1. Introduction
There have been tremendous developments in information and communication technology in the past. Modern technology is based on the combination of computers, telecommunication networks, digital information and intelligent software. The combination of this communication infrastructure has resulted in new forms of communication, collaboration, business processes and social relationships. Internet has always played the central role as the backbone of modern state of art technology. In the present context, it has its growing impact in the areas of education, business, industries, warfare, law enforcement and social networks. Virtualization is impacting the behaviour of individual and organization. Things are getting smarter day by day with the help of internet connectivity. These trends and patterns show that we are now transforming to the age of the intelligent agents. Having told these, this case study introduces the positive and negative impacts of the internet technology in the social, environmental and economic sectors of modern society and suggests some ways to manage them.

2. History of the Internet- a timeline

The internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the standard internet protocol suite called TCP/IP. It consists of interconnected networks that are linked through electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The internet carries a range of information resources between million networks of local to global scope such as private, public, government, business, scientific research, academic etc. The origin of the internet reach back to research commissioned by the U.S. government in the 1960s.Internet was introduced in 1969. ARPANET became the first network to run on packet switching technology which was a complete new technology at that time. Computers at Stanford and UCLA connected for the first time. During the 60s the Unix operating system came into existence which is the base of modern operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD that are popularly used in todays web servers and web hosting services. An ARPANET network was established between Harvard, MIT, and BBN in 1970. In 1971 Email was developed for the first time. Project Gutenberg was launched with the concept of making books and documents in the public domain available in electronic form. This gave birth to eBook. France began its own ARPANET-like project in 1972, called Cyclades, with the key idea that the host computer should be responsible for data transmission rather than the network itself. In 1973 ARPANET made its first trans-Atlantic connection with the University College of London. During the same time, email became so popular that it accounted for most of the ARPANET network activity at that time. In the history, internet paved a milestone in 1974. A proposal was published to link ARPA-like networks into an inter-network, which would have no central control and would work around a transmission control protocol. This eventually transformed into todays well known and widely used internet protocol called the TCP/IP. With the popularity of emailing, the first modern email program was developed in 1975. The program was named MSG and included both the reply and forward functionality. There was advancement in the internet technology as we know it today. This was 1977 when the first PC modem was developed and introduced in the market. The first bulletin board system (BBS) was developed during a blizzard in Chicago in 1978. In the same year Spam was born. The first unsolicited commercial email message was sent out to 600 California ARPANET users. MUD the earliest form of multiplayer games was developed in 1979. They were entirely textbased virtual worlds. In 1979, Usenet came into the scene. It was an internet-based discussion system which allowed people from around the world to start a conversation on topics through posting public messages according to newsgroups. CERN launched ENQUIRE during 1980. It was a hypertext/hyperlink program allowing scientists at the particle physics lab to keep track of people, software, and projects. In 1983 ARPANET computers switched over to TCP/IP protocols. The name server (NS) was also developed in the same year. The Domain Name System (DNS) was created in 1984 along with the first Domain Name Servers. DNS servers allowed internet users to type in an easy-to-remember domain name instead of numerical IP address. Virtual communities such as The Well which is still in operation came into existence during 1985. The so-called Protocol wars began in 1986. Countries in the Europe were pursuing the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), while the USA was using the Internet/ARPANET Protocol, which is in use today. The internet was growing in a rapid fashion. By 1987, there were nearly 30,000 hosts on the internet. This was possible because of the adoption of the TCP/IP standard which can interconnect a large number of hosts. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was first deployed in 1988. This led to the evolution of instant messaging programs that we use today. After the AppleLink program in 1989, America Online (AOL) was born. AOL, which is still in existence helped to make internet popular among the average internet users. The proposal for the World Wide Web was brought the same year. In 1990 the first commercial dial-up Internet

Service Provider (ISP) called The World was brought about and in the same year, ARPANET ceased to exist. The coding for World Wide Web protocols have been finished along with the standards for HTML, HTTP, and URLs. The first web page was created in 1990 which was really a major innovation to the world of internet. In 1991, the first content-based search protocol called Gopher was launched which had the ability to examine file contents instead of just file names. MP3 file format was accepted as a standard in the same year. MP3 file format became popular in the internet for sharing because of its high compression. One of the more interesting developments of this time was the first webcam, which was deployed at Cambridge University computer lab. Among other browsers of 90s, Mosaic, which was released in 1993, was the widely downloaded internet browser. It is considered the first browser to make the internet easily accessible to the general public. White House and the United Nations came online, marking the beginning of the .gov and .org domain names. Netscape navigator which is considered to be the Mosaics first big competitor was released in 1994. 1995 is often considered the first year the web became commercialized because a few key developments happened that year. Netscape developed a first Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption which made it safer to conduct financial transaction online over the internet. Echo Bay which is todays eBay and Amazo n.com started their online business. Java and JavaScript was introduced to the public for the first time. Microsoft launched ActiveX the following year. In 1996, HoTMaiL, the first web-based (webmail) service, was launched. Next year, the term weblog was coined, although blogs had been around for a few years. It was 1998; the news story was broken online instead of traditional media. A major event that happened this year was the Google going live. This revolutionized the way in which people find information online. Napster was launched the same year. Internet-based file sharing started its way around. 2000 was the year of the dotcom collapse. This resulted in huge losses for crowds of investors. Despite of this collapse still going on, 2001 saw a light in the internet history. Wikipedia, one of the websites paved the way for collective web content generation and a social media. Skype was released in 2003 to the general public. Thus, providing a graphical user-friendly interface for Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) calls. MySpace opened up its door and grew to become the most popular social network. Web 2.0, which refers to websites and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that are highly interactive and user-driven, became popular around 2004. During the same year the term social media was coined and social news site such as Digg was launched. This revolutionized traditional means of generating and finding web content. The Facebook, literally todays facebook, one of the most popular social media, was launched in 2004. YouTube, the most widely used video streaming website launched in 2005, brought free online video hosting and sharing to the crowd. A year later Twitter started twittering. In 2007 a major step was taken to put TV shows online. Hulu, was launched to make popular TV shows available to watch online. The biggest innovation of 2007 was the iPhone and the mobile web applications and design. The first Internet Election took place in 2008 with the U.S. Presidential election. In effect the internet was placed squarely at the forefront of politics and campaigning. From 2010 to present day the internet is widely used for media consumption, mobile advertising, online video advertising, media engagement, real-time social media, cloud computing, webinars etc.

3. Impact of internet technology

3.1 Environmental impact of internet Technological progress has benefited mankind from the beginning but this has been at a cost to the environment which in turn poses the question on the health of humanity itself. Internet as a part of information and communication technology in general has different types of effects on the environment. The growing number of IT infrastructures such as routers, receiver systems, end appliances including PC and mobile phones etc. use a lot of energy. This energy demand is in turn supplied by environment in some forms. There are a lot of electronic waste, pollutant and electrosmog from the IT infrastructures. The disposal of batteries can create bad chemical effect in the environment. The networks of overhead cables and their supporting structures have made the environment look ugly and unmanaged. Moreover those wired and wireless transmission network produce in their vicinity strong electro-magnetic fields. Numerous studies and research have reported increased health problems such as cancer associated with the exposure to electromagnetic fields. There are also some good effects of the internet on the environment. Due to internet technology we are able to forecast the weather conditions beforehand thus we can save lives and valuable environment assets from loss and damage. We can continuously monitor the weather and wildlife so that we can preserve them. At the same time due to technological advancement we have increased the agricultural productivity. Thus, internet technology has brought changes in life styles and consumption patterns.

3.2 Social impacts of internet The internet is part of the technological foundation of modern society and has significant importance to its constitution and development. Internet is facilitating a reorganizing of information and social relationships across time and space. The internet can thus be seen as not just simply an alternative means of distributing information but also as a way of creating new forms of action and interaction. In our society a growing number of internet users especially the youths and college students spend their leisure time in the cyber community. Many youths have used internet facility as a window of opportunity and succeeded in their career. On the other hand there are students who involve their time in surfing internet, playing online games, spending times in social media. We can find a number of such students left schooling in early life and started a hard life involving in illegal and criminal works. The influence of cyber culture on teenagers socialization is rapidly growing. Family members, relatives, friends, well-wishers or anyone living in different location around the globe are able to interact with each other virtually with the help of internet facilities and VOIP softwares such as Skype. This has helped in strengthening personal relationship and served as a base for socio-cultural unity. Internet has brought both political unity and fragmentation in our society. Number of virtual communities is on rise day by day. There used to be prevailing arranged-marriage in our society but with the internet technology and online dating websites, the scene has completely changed its track into the new direction. Internet is a huge and infinite database of information. The students are becoming smarter because they can see and learn about the state-of-art technology and can understand where they stand on the globe. They are able to communicate with their teachers or fellow students about their problems or any innovative ideas. Use of internet has build up confidence among the students with a can-do approach.

Research activities are increasing day by day. Many students are taking their higher studies especially in the field of ICT through online courses and trainings. People are carrying out their business activities online through internet. They can pay bills, book tickets, shop online etc. through internet. Distance learning has existed for some time. The internet is making possible for large coverage and better delivery of instruction. Development in internet technology has made possible to combine text with audio and videos, and such students are able to interact in real time through e-mails and discussion groups. Technological progress is making people more dependent on technology, which can bring risks. Failures in the technological infrastructures can cause the collapse of economic and social functionality.

3.3 Economic impact of internet technology Information technology has different impact on the economy of a country or of some specific area. The impact is mostly positive but it is not always true. With passage of time and progress in technologies many organizations of various types, scopes and services are being started in our work area. Many banks and institutions are established. Since the persons working in such business are better educated and highly paid, the demand for services of high value and better quality is increasing. To fulfil the demands many hotels, restaurants, shopping centre, recreation areas etc. are in operation. With this expansion of services of all types, various employment opportunities have been created to local people in our area. To supply the increasing demand of internet, more and more Internet Service Provider (ISP) is established. It has created jobs for computer professionals. The property value has risen. People are making greater income by working on flexible schedules: working part time, sharing jobs, or holding two or more jobs simultaneously. Internet technology has extended the market reach globally. Many outsourcing companies especially in the areas of software development have been established. It has a good contribution in the economy of our workplace. The globalization has resulted in a natural competitiveness. People are getting quality services in low price. With the help of web technology many INGOs have explored the feasible possibilities in different sectors of our society and thus the foreign investment has triggered huge economic development. In the other hand, sophisticated equipments have replaced the human resources in the industrial market. A large number of labour forces are getting unemployed. This has created a negative impact on the economy in our workplace.

4. Management of internet technology

Due to positive and negative aspects of technology humanity needs to seriously consider just how to use technology in a sustainable way. There are many applications of internet technology. Enterprises are generating demand for internet connectivity through the development of new service offerings that provide value to customers. The internet price is costly; only the people with high income are able to afford it. Even if it is costly the quality of service is not assured. The wireless towers for broadband are scattered here and there on the residential buildings because they have been installed without prior technical studies of the field coverage and health issues. Most of the internet connections are using wired cables which can be seen hanging haphazardly on the electrical supports. The low clearance of the cables crossing the roads are disturbing the large-sized vehicles and due to this there are frequent cutting and tearing in the connection cables. There are internet facilities but still the general people have to stay in queue inside the internet providers premises to pay the bills. There are a lot of cyber crimes going on but no cyber law is in effect. With internet technologies employees are displaced by efficient and effective intelligent machines. This has created massive unemployment and the government is not paying any concern. Electronic surveillance systems are not managed properly in the critical places of business and security concern such as banks and airports. There are no any strict legal rules in action against breach of privacy policy, data theft, identity theft, and plagiarisms. Online social media are being constantly exploited for political vengeance. This clearly shows that the management of internet technology is very poor in our workplace. Concerned authorities should address these issues as soon as possible before it gets late. Various awareness programs should be organised for general public regarding the impacts of internet technologies. Strong policy is to be made to manage internet technology in a sustainable way as an appropriate technology. On the other hand ethics is important because strong reliance on the law alone to safeguard the community has its limits.

5. Future of internet technology

The future internet will not be just an evolution of what we have already. There will be new architectures, new interfaces, new ways of managing data, new ways of integrating all the different internet entities- devices, sensors, services, things and , of course, people. Sensors and ambient networks are likely to be based on different more energy-savvy protocols. Thus, any object will be able to have communications capabilities embedded within it and several objects in an ambient environment will create a communication network. We need to see the internet of future as this seamless fabric of classic networks and networked objects. In a way this is the internet as it was conceived from the very beginning: a network of networks, but by 2020 these networks will be laid out as public infrastructures and dynamically created by the objects connecting to one another. The content and services they facilitate will be all around us, always on, everywhere, all the time. The internet users will grow rapidly as more and more people will get access to it. Scaling will be an issue for any future internet architecture. The internet will be more geographically dispersed. The most of the internet growth will come from developing countries. This trend means the internet will not only reach more remote locations around the globe but also will support more languages and nonASCII scripts. The internet will be a network of things, not only computers. As more critical infrastructure gets hooked up to the internet, the internet is expected to become a network of devices rather than network of computers. Billions of sensors is expected to be used on buildings and bridges and connected to the internet for such uses as electricity and security monitoring. Internet will be incorporated in the smart grid technologies. Global traffic rate will increase in such a way that we need to think in re-architecting the internet to be content-centric network, rather than a transport network. The number of mobile broadband subscriber will increase rapidly. The internet will be greener. Energy intensity is growing at a slower rate than data traffic volumes as networking technologies become more energy efficient. The trend towards greening the internet will accelerate as energy prices rise, according to experts pushing energy-aware internet routing. Network management will be more automated. Among the ideas under consideration are automated ways to reboot systems, self-diagnosing protocols, finer grained data collection and better event tracking. The internet will attract more hackers. More hackers will be attacking the internet because more critical infrastructure like the electric grid will be online.

References Valerie Quercia, (ed) Linda Mui, Intenet In A Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference, OReilly & Associates, Inc, 1st edn, October1997 (eds) Niels Brgger & Henrik Bdker, The Internet and Society?, Papers from The Centre for Internet Research, Aarhus, Denmark, 2002 (ed) W. Russell Neuman, Media, Technology and Society: Theories of Media Evolution, Draft Manuscript for University of Michigan Press, December 2008