The Gradual Evolution of Technological Functions

In Inventing the Internet (2000), Janet Abbate offers a well-explicated history of the origins of the Internet. She traces the history of this technology from the development of networking techniques in the early 1960s to the introduction of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. While she offers a good amount of detail on the techniques and design issues involved such as packet switching and layering, her account does not stop at being an internalist history. She places the technical development of the Internet in its political, social, and cultural context and looks at many causes beside the technical factors that shaped and were shaped by the Internet. Abbate explains, for instance, how the military demands of the US during the Cold War caused ARPA (the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to look for methods that suited values such as survivability, flexibility, and high performance rather than commercial values such as simplicity and low cost. While this gave rise to the development of a technique called packet switching by figures like Baran, Davies and Roberts, this technique did not simply ‘win’ due to its technical superiority, but was looked at by suspicion in the computer science community until it was actually funded, implemented and supported institutionally. Over all, Abatte makes a good case for the social construction of the Internet and its development from a combination of military and academic origins.

What I found the most interesting in this story was how the Internet repeatedly moved in different directions that were not anticipated and intended when it was first conceived. As Abbate explains, one distinctive aspect of the ARPANET was that the distinction between producers and users of this technology did not exist, since ARPA’s researches were building this network for their own use. As a result, any user with the requisite skill and interest could contribute to the evolution of the system. For instance, although Roberts had envisaged that the ARPANET would be used mainly to access time sharing computers, that was not what eventually happened. Through the users’ innovations and individual choices, the idea of resource sharing was gradually replaced by the idea of the network as a means for communication, as users mostly tended to use the ARPANET for sending emails. I believe this is very instructive as to how the function of a technology is determined. Contrary to the traditional way of thinking about technology which equates the function of a technology with its intended use, the history of the Internet teaches us that the function of a technology evolves over time in the context of the needs and interests of its users and consumers.

Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. MIT Press, 2000.