Internet

By: Umaru Bah

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

Internet

The launching of the first satellite, Sputnik I, in October 1957 by the Soviet Union is considered by most researchers as the driving force behind the development of the Internet. The launching provoked a national security crisis to which the Eisenhower administration responded by establishing two months later the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and a year later the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). ARPA was to create a communication system that could guarantee uninterrupted communication among military commanders during a nuclear attack, while NASA was to provide extraterrestrial defense systems to protect against such attack.

The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), founded under ARPA in 1962, secured federal funding for a research project focusing on dynamic, real-time human interaction with and through computers. Over the years the project evolved into a collaborative effort by renowned physicists (such as J. C. R. Licklider, Paul Baran, Donald Davies, Lawrence Roberts, Robert Kahn, and Leonard Kleinrock), universities (Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Stanford Research Institute, the Universities of California at Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Utah), a defense agency (the Rand Corporation), and an IT firm (System Development Corporation). That same year, MIT's J. C. R. Licklider discussed in a series of memos his idea of a “galactic network” of computers, the first known written concept of Internet working. Leonard Kleinrock, of the same university, had published a groundbreaking article a year earlier on packet switching as a method of computer-mediated information sharing.

Origin and Development of the Internet.

The myriad intertwining digital circuitry of nodes, bits, and bytes that connect computers around the world today—and through which humans interact—was developed steadily over the years based on this very concept. By 1969 the first documented attempt at real-time communication by means of two computer terminals—one at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the other at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI)—met with partial success: Leonard Kleinrock, then a computer science professor at UCLA, wanted to type “login” and verify that his colleagues at the SRI could see his typing on their screen. The system crashed after “log.”

A modified and better-performing system was publicly demonstrated three years later at the International Conference of Computer Communications, held at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. This breakthrough nourished and sustained the innovative fervor and collaborative spirit among scientists (primarily in the United States, but some also in Europe and Asia) dedicated to building the hardware, software, and protocols that make up the Internet today. In 1972, Ray Tomlinson's “@” sign became the standard and sole symbol denoting email addresses. In 1974, Vinton Cerf, considered by many network scientists as the father of the Internet, introduced with Robert Kahn the transmission control program (TCP), a protocol for effective message transmission via computers. The program was later modified to include Internet protocol (IP), giving TCP/IP.

Also in 1974 the computer network company Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) made TELNET available to the public—the first commercial, nonmilitary, public packet data service. Six years later, BITNET, another commercial network, offered to businesses e-mail, Listservs, and file-transfer services. In 1984 the Domain Name System (DNS) established a set of guidelines for domain-name extensions, the first five being .edu, .gov, .mil, .org, and .net. Four years later the Internet relay chat (IRC) was introduced by the Finnish graduate student Jarkko Oikarinen.

One of the most significant developments in computer-mediated communication among humans occurred in 1991 when the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, working at the Swiss-based European Organization for Nuclear Research (which goes by the French acronym CERN), wrote hypertext markup language (HTML), the global language of the Web. This invention, along with that in 1994 of Netscape's commercial browser Mozilla and that in 1995 of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, effectively gave birth to the World Wide Web. Although today the Web is inextricably linked in practice to the Internet, the two are not interchangeable. The Internet is a global network of computer networks. The Web is one method, albeit the most popular, of sharing and displaying messages via the Internet. The Web is not required for the Internet to function, but the Internet is one of the required tools for the Web to function.

Publicly accessible archives and the current body of literature on the technical development of the Internet do not reflect any significant contribution by African American researchers or scientists. It remains unclear whether no significant contribution was indeed made, whether such contributions have not been documented, or whether such documentation has yet to be discovered or publicly shared. Nonetheless, mention needs be made of the disputable contribution made by the Nigerian-born and U.S.-educated scientist Philip Emeagwali. Though most in the international scientific community respect his achievements—for which he has received many awards and mentions, including a 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, offered by the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a ranking by the London-based New African magazine as the thirty-fifth-greatest African of all time, and a mention by President Bill Clinton as an example of what Africans can achieve when given the opportunity—they reject his claim to be father of the Internet, pointing out that no publications, presentations, patents, memos, or requests for comments (RFCs) exist in his name to support such a claim.

Since 1995 the Internet has experienced exponential growth in the number of Web sites, Web users, and Web functionalities. The number of Internet users worldwide has grown from 16 million in 1995 to well over 1 billion in the early twenty-first century. The number of domain hosts for the same period has increased from 4.9 million to well over 450 million. A significant number of Web sites now contain audio and video streaming content. The Internet has decisively transformed developed countries into globally connected digital-information societies, dictating, among other things, the pace and tempo—if not the nature itself—of politics, economics, religion, social networking, health, education, entertainment, grassroots organization, and addiction of all kinds.

The Internet has also been used to propagate hatred. The Web, by virtue of its ability to reach millions of people across the globe instantaneously at little or no cost to the Web site owner, has been used as an effective tool for propaganda and recruitment by hate groups. The actual number of hate sites—that is, Web sites advocating racial supremacy and/or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, nationality, or political orientation, to name but a few—is unknown, not least because of problems of definition and laws that ban such sites in most countries in Europe and Asia. Such sites flourish in the United States, however, where their existence and most of their activities are protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. DMOZ.org, a free, user-centered and user-managed open directory of Web sites, lists more than 120 hate sites. They consist of all forms of hatred advocated by individuals or groups across all nationalities, ethnicities, and political and religious affiliations, including anti-Semitism by Islamic terrorist groups and black and white supremacists, anti-Islamism by Jewish groups, and gay bashing by white-supremacist punk-rock bands.

The Digital Divide.

Discussing the Internet vis-à-vis African Americans invariably requires discussing the so-called digital divide (DD), a term used by scholars, policy makers, businesses, and community activists to describe the growing gap—highlighted and widened by the Internet—between those who have access to digital information and technology and those who do not. The concept echoes the “knowledge gap” hypothesis, first proposed in 1970 by Philip J. Tichenor, George Donohue, and Clarice N. Olien, who argued that new information technologies, and the intellectual, political, and economic capital that they generate or facilitate, widen rather than narrow the socioeconomic disparities between those rich in information and those poor. The former, by virtue of their higher level of education and income, are able to access and use information that allows awareness of and active participation in the political process, while the latter remain uninformed and disengaged.

Following three studies on the digital divide conducted in 1995, 1998, and 1999 by the U.S. Department of Commerce, President Clinton gave national and international prominence to the debate by mentioning it in his 2000 State of the Union address and by proposing in the same year funded initiatives and joint partnerships with corporations to bridge the divide by providing computers and the Internet to geographically disadvantaged communities and economically distressed groups and neighborhoods.

Perspectives on the digital divide generally fall into one of three categories. A minority view holds that it does not exist. Another, though acknowledging the existence of the divide, believes that it should be defined as a problem less of ability to access and download content than of ability to create and upload content. Proponents of this perspective argue that technological innovations and the marketplace could solve the access problem but not the creation and upload problem. A third group differs slightly from the second, asserting that both content access and content creation could be solved by newer information technologies and commercial imperatives. What cannot be solved without government support, they argue, is active participation by minorities in the digital economy. To help level the playing field, they propose that the government should provide and support the educational training and financial loans necessary for minority e-commerce enterprises.

Statistics on Internet access and usage since 1998 have shed greater light on the merits and demerits of the debate about the digital divide. In 2007, more than 80 percent of African Americans accessed the Internet, as opposed to 22 percent in 1998; both figures were still behind those for whites, more than 88 percent of whom accessed the Internet in 2007, as opposed to 26 percent in 1998. However, African Americans were more likely than whites to use the Internet for information gathering, social networking, entertainment, and job hunting. In addition, broadband and wireless technologies are enabling the creation and access of converging media into ever smaller devices, making Internet access almost ubiquitous and rendering the issue of ownership of a desktop or laptop computer considerably less important. Readily available and often free, do-it-yourself Web tools are empowering Web audiences, including a significant number of African Americans, to create their own Web pages and blogs (“Web logs”), a digital diary of their personal lives or opinions. A growing number of Web sites, such as YouTube.com, allow users to share their audio and video content for free. Other sites, such as Wikipedia.org, provide a free agora for intellectual public discourse and for knowledge gathering and sharing.

These developments have helped bridge and in some cases overcome the digital divide as it relates to Internet access and content creation. In relation to e-commerce, however, the results are disheartening. The U.S. Census Bureau reported more than $75 billion in online retail sales for the year 2006. It is not known how much of this was generated by minority-owned businesses generally, or by African American businesses in particular. Judging, however, by the bureau's 2006 report on the 2002 statistics for black-owned firms by kind of business, the total number of minority-owned firms in the information industry was 14,317, of which 590 were Internet publishing and broadcasting firms and 2,300 were Internet service providers (ISPs), Web search portals, and data-processing services. The information industry reported annual sales revenues of $2.5 billion, of which $2 million were from Internet publishing and broadcasting and $21 million from ISPs, Web search portals, and data-processing services. In other words, the revenue generated in e-commerce by black-owned companies in 2002 was $23 million, less than one-twentieth of 1 percent of the $48 billion generated from online retail that year. These results would still be unsatisfactory if a hundredfold increase (that is, to 5 percent) in the share of online sales generated in 2006 by black-owned businesses is assumed.

These dismal statistics are not, however, due to want of entrepreneurial foresight or ingenuity among African Americans. As early as 1996, African American online entrepreneurs such as Dwayne Walker of TechWave.com, Kimberly Davis of Idgventures.com, and Kenneth Jackson of Innetix.com were already successfully offering multimillion-dollar business-to-business online broadband, wireless, and knowledge-based services. By 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, young enterprising Internet entrepreneurs such as Omar Wasow (founder and CEO of BlackPlanet.com) and intellectuals such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Anthony Appiah (cofounders of Africana.com) had launched successful knowledge-based and social-networking services relating to and targeted primarily at African Americans. But by 2005 most of these ventures had folded or had been bought by larger enterprises.

Of course, neither the low success rate of Internet startups nor the consequences of media mergers and acquisitions are exclusive to African American ventures. They are common in a highly competitive and rapidly changing information-driven commercial environment. But African Americans, though being roughly on a par with whites in Internet access and usage, and despite their keen interest and determination, are far less likely to succeed in e-commerce ventures—as evidenced by the total number of black-owned Web sites, which is only about 128,000, according to listings by BlackRefer.com, a directory of black-owned Web sites. If a strong case could be made that the digital divide still exists, it would be based primarily on the racial disparity that exits in online entrepreneurship.

[See also Education; Entrepreneurship; Hate Groups; and Technology and Engineering.]

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