Stefan Münker and Alexander Roesler From myth to standard practice And a history of the Internet When in the mid Nineties, the Internet set off on its path to success, expectations were high - too high. So, even before most people knew how to use a browser or surf on the digital network, a myth was born: the myth of a new and wonderful world in which you could go beyond the limits of space and time to create the places of utopian visions and bring them to life. As the technology of the world of the net progressed, it became possible, but also necessary, to break the myth’s spell1. And that’s just one aspect. Despite the fact that the inventions of the wheel, writing, printing machines, the steam engine or the telephone may have been more important in terms of the history of civilization, it is still true that up until now no medium like the Internet has generated such a high number of important changes and technical innovations; and its success story is far from over. The other aspect is this: new cultural practices – whose key words are e-mail, chat etc. – have emerged and influence previous ones. We communicate in a different way, we have faster access to information, and we move in new and different ways in a world that actually appears to have become smaller, or in any event to have undergone a transformation in media terms. Today, for many of us, the INTERnational NETwork is part of our daily lives: it is an engine that fuels economic growth and scientific progress, a tool for social and political commerce, a means for artistic and literary works, an agora, a darkroom, a laboratory, an archive and a search engine. Above all it represents an irreversible process. Instead of nurturing illusory expectations, nowadays users make straightforward practical requests of this technology and its (continual) developments, and expect competence, flexibility and creativity. Life and commerce in an electronic environment visibly represent common practice for entire communities and for mankind in general, even outside of the digital sphere. The truth is that what has happened depends paradoxically on the strength of the myth. Its utopian tales of possible conquests of cyber space, paralleling them to the colonization of a new and far-away continent brimming with unexpected opportunities, liberated the initial energy needed for the enormous technological and economical 1 S. Münker / A. Roesler (ed.), Mythos Internet, .Suhrkamp 1997. efforts that have led to the establishment of the Internet as a medium that works globally and that can be used by the masses. Energy that is all-important for its future development. But despite the fact that these Utopias can provide us with an incentive, they have not let themselves be transformed into standard practice. The latest social sphere to have suffered enormous losses was the economy. Even the so-called rational experts of the economy’s local and global players, after an initial hesitation, in the end believed in the almost too optimistic promises of the market and read too much into them, attempting to capitalize on them, and to a certain extent ended up paying dearly for them. The mistakes made in economic evaluations are typical. Even though, in this era of globalisation, the Internet is no doubt an efficient medium and is able to generate profits for e-commerce, it can quite rightly be confirmed that with the Internet, Marx’s words “all peoples mingle in the network of the world market” has reached its digital level (Haug 619). However, the euphoric visions of the so-called “new” market, also known as the other one, have not succeeded in integrating with the existing economic system: what exists is actually a single market. Ironically the bankruptcy of the Internet start-up companies and the collapse of shares such as Dotcom provide more information about how the stock market works than how Internet works. And despite everything, once the initial media hubbub had subsided, the Internet was shelved as a mere myth, a bit like throwing the baby away with the dirty water. In the same way as the myth and the Enlightenment are linked dialectically, the utopian potential promised by the myth is in actual fact intertwined with the practical use of the network. Brief history of the Internet “Where you are makes no difference”, “you will find what you are looking for”. The Internet makes promises such as these to draw us users into its spell. A promise that talks about uniting the memory capacity of a digital machine with the possibility of transcribing electronic media in truth does sound like the Utopia of successful globalisation. It tells us that: everything is always there, each one of us is always understood. What each of us says, is revealed by the statistics (that given the rapid growth are almost always out of date before they are even published): if five years ago the number of users was estimated to be around 50-60 million, today, in 2001, the number has risen to around 400 million. There are estimated to be around 110 million hosts, which simply means computers that have a personal Internet address. In August 2001, only half of the population of Germany had access to the Internet. Users spent most of their time simply surfing the net, participating in on-line auctions and looking for bargains on the second-hand sites, amusing themselves in the numerous chat rooms or with multiplayer video games. The most common uses of the net, apart from e-mail which is the most popular and attractive feature of this new medium, are downloading of a variety of different types of data, online banking and shopping, holiday reservations, the use of various services by public enterprises, such as trading shares and securities, and, last but not least, visiting pornographic sites. Just as the triumphant march of the Internet, from the mid Nineties on, was consumed in an impetuous and spectacular way, setting up the connection of the network of networks has dragged itself slowly and imperceptibly over the course of a long period of time: The responsibility for the birth of Internet can be attributed in a certain sense to the Sputnik, or more precisely the fear of the USA of losing the struggle for universal supremacy after the Soviet rocket made its blissful trip around the world. Because of this, at the end of the Fifties, the Pentagon gave life, amongst other things, to a new research group, the so- called Advanced Research Project Agency, abbreviated to ARPA. A decade later, the struggle in space was temporarily resolved, with the moon landing of Apollo 11, in favour of the Americans, who were just about to suffer a new humiliation, this time on a bigger scale given that they were the leading world power: the retreat from Vietnam. For this reason, Arpa’s scientists developed a decentralised network, named Arpanet, whose strategic aim was to connect up computers at different military bases, so that communication could not be interrupted even in the event of a nuclear attack. The outcome of this historical-media development was the transformation of the computer from calculator to means of communication, something that, according to Arpa documentation, took place thanks to the then director J.C.R. Licklider. In autumn ’69 Arpanet went online in collaboration with the University of California in Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of Utah and the University of California in Santa Barbara. The number of universities connected rose rapidly as they started to discover the advantages of the network, above those strictly linked to military and strategic circles, for those interested in exchanging scientific information. Consequently, the technical possibilities of the network continually progressed. This is how, for example, in 1971, the File-Transfer-Protocol made it possible to exchange data between individual computers; Telnet enabled direct access to another computer connected to the network; and finally, thanks to the user@host convention, Internet’s electronic mail (e- mail) service was programmed. In 1973, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) gave a decisive boost to further development: the connection between different networks and, with the later addition of Internet Protocol (IP) to TCP, the network officially received its name. In 1978 the Arpanet experiment finally reached its conclusion, even though the Arpanet itself was closed down only in 1990. In parallel to further developments of the technical possibilities of Internet, additional networks were created in the Eighties, on the basis of the Bulletin Board System (BBS), some were private such as FidoNet in 1983 or in 1985, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL), and others were commercial, such as Computerserve and AOL, that worked without being connected to Internet for a brief initial period. When in 1989 Computerserve started to dominate in Internet, the idea of independent networks disappeared de facto. From the end of the Eighties, the Internet started to envelop the globe with its network. Despite this, for several years, it was relatively unfamiliar to the general public; also because it was truly difficult to use. The solution to the problem, that launched the real boom of the Internet, was the invention of Tim Berners-Lee at the Swiss Research Centre CERN in 1991: the Word Wide Web. The network therefore became suitable for multimedia use and was warmly welcomed by the global information society, already omnipresent at that time. In the meantime the three letters WWW have almost become a synonym of the Internet and hardly anybody remembers the times of network pioneers when there were no images or sounds, when the pilot programs that surfed on the sea of data had beautiful names such as Gopher, Veronica or Archie… The rest of the story is common knowledge: the Internet developed in three stages starting from the strategic experiments of the American army, then through an international communication plan set up by university researchers, and finally to the commercialisation of this means of communication, for many nowadays used as a sort of “means of daily assistance”.