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Comparing the Internet to Television and RadioOne of the key skills of a good student is being able to critically review a piece of text. To look at it from more than one point of view, and not take what it says for granted. The course text (available from the OU T182 website) puts it like this.
Taking this to heart, I read the start of the next page.
Let's take a critical look at this sentence, and see what we find. On the face of it, this means that the internet had something which neither radio nor television had, something which enabled it to reach a 'critical point' such that the expansion was inevitable, which both television and radio also reached, but at a much slower pace. Section 1.2 goes on to highlight the expansion in communications caused by the internet, and how the internet and the web have enabled people to communicate in new and different ways which were not even envisaged by the people who built the internet backbone. I would agree that the internet had something different to radio and television. I would agree so strongly, in fact, that comparing their rate of growth would not be useful, as you are comparing the rate of growth of different things, under very different conditions. Take a look, for example, at the turn of the 20th century. In May 1898, Marconi first patented his wireless telecommunications system, and the radio age was born. On 12 December 1901, Signal Hill received the famous "dit dit dit" signal3. On Christmas Eve, 1906, Reginald Fessenden transmitted music and human speech, instead of the Morse code normally used. In 1910, radio programs were aired from New York's Metropolitan Opera House, and in 1916, Frank Conrad played records over the air for his friends.4 If we look at the economy of that time, we see that the average annual income, in Chicago, was $7565. Taking into account inflation, this would be approximately equal to $15,000 in 20006. Industry at this time (in Chicago at least) was mainly based around production of clothing, food, rail cars and boundary and machine shops. Electrical apparatus had only 5% of the work force7: and there was no automation at all, so workforce is a very good measure of the size of an industry. The cost of a manufactured radio was $35, in 1924, for a single-person radio set8. This was 4.6% of 1900 annual income! Given we have an (roughly speaking) average annual household income today of £20,000, that would be the equivalent of spending £925.99. And that didn't include speakers! The technological support for radio just was not there. The vast majority of early radio sets were home-built. Mass production was just coming in, but that was for cars. It was not until the after the first world war, where radio was used by both sides as a military asset, that the infrastructure for production of radio transmitters and receivers was in place. So, for the first 20 years of radio's life, there was no basic infrastructure to support the manufacture or repair of the required technology. Let's take a look at television. Here we have a problem; who created Television? John Logie Baird and Charles Francis Jenkins both seem to have been working on the problem at the same time, and it depends who you ask as to who got there first. In 1921, C F Jenkins incorporated a laboratory to develop "radio movies to be broadcast for entertainment in the home." In 1925 both Baird and Jenkins demonstrated synchronised transmission of pictures and sound, Baird in London, Jenkins in Washington. In 1926 the first television station, WGY, started broadcasting in America.9 The most interesting thing about these two systems is that they were both mechanical in nature. The screens were just over an inch wide, and they used 30 to 60 lines to create the image10. Electronic television did not start until 1930, after the development of both the cathode ray tube, and the electronic camera tube. Scheduled electronic broadcasting actually started in 1936 in England.11 As with radio, let's examine the economic and industrial aspects of this time. The biggest impact has to be from the great depression. In October of 1929, the US stock market crashed. This lead to a depression which quickly spread across the pond to Europe. By 1933, 44% of the United States banks had gone bust. Unemployment was high, and consumer spending power low12. This time the second world war saw an increase in technology and industry. The research into radar lead to an explosion of understanding about electronics, which enabled television to be launched on a firm footing post-war13. So, for the first 15 or so years, television had neither the required technology, nor the economic stability required to ensure it's success. Now let's take a look at the Internet. In 1969, the US Department of Defence commissioned a interconnected network for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPANET. The first node was hooked up on the 2nd September, at UCLA, Stanford joined in on the 1st October, and by December, two additional universities were linked in. By 1971 it had expanded to 15 nodes, and it went international in 1973, with the University College of London coming in. 1973 also saw the first idea for the internet, from Cerf and Kahn at INWG in September at University of Sussex. And in 1975, the operational management for this new internet was transferred to the Defence Information Systems Agency (then the DCA), and the first mailing list was set up14. For full details, please do refer to Hobbes' Internet Timeline, which is both informative, and entertaining. It even includes links to some of the first Request for Comments (RFC) which went out at this time in the early internet community. in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext project, called "WorldWideWeb", based on his early work, to his then employer, CERN, and in 1991, CERN gave birth to the web15. From the above, it is easy to see that the internet stared among university research departments. People who already had in place the architecture to provide network computers to their staff, and who wanted to be able to connect to other research departments. The infrastructure to build this network was already in place. The US government were willing to pay for it. The internet had both the technology and the money at the start, as well as an already existent user-base; which neither television nor radio had. I can remember using JANET, a fore-runner of the internet, back in 1986, when I was at Exeter University. We had global e-mail, multi-user games, ability to send files back and forth. My partner, Peter, wrote his first web page in 1993, only two years after the start of the web. The web, like the internet, started in academia, and spread out from there by the auspices of students wanting to 'have a play' at something new. This is what started the internet explosion. In conclusion, I would have to say that the comparison between the 'world-wide-web' and both television and radio is spurious. Television and radio's early years were in a situation where the technology required to transmit or receive them was in its infancy, and the global economy was poor. It took a war for both of them to gather the momentum required to reach the point where they were accepted norms, as opposed to novelty items. The Internet was started using already available technology, and the world-wide web was based on a system which had been in use for almost a decade, and required almost nothing more than a simple text editor for anyone to be able to craft a web page for publication. The user-base was pre-existent, in the numerous researchers, and university students, and already had access to the technology needed to connect to the internet. The explosive growth of the web was based on this ready made scenario which existed at its emergence. Footnotes
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