A better way to phrase it is: The birth of the internet (1969) is closer to the birth of television (1927) than it is to today.
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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The birth of the internet and the birth of the world wide web are two differnet things though: The world wide web started in 1989.
Why do I have August 6, 1991 on my mind for "the world wide web switches on"?
That was the day he opened it up to the world. 1989 was when he got it working at CERN, and it was released into the public domain in 1993.
Now listen here you little shit ...
If you think about it, every tech is just radio. And I don't just mean cellular, wifi, and bluetooth, There are few things on an SoC that aren't just refinements and miniaturizations of radio tech.
IMO modulation is wildly different than radio.
It's all based on the same mathematical model. And since it's not profitable to make real progress in technology when you're already making money from it, it's all a very similar concept of the same technology. Capitalism sure is swell 🙃
I feel like this is a false equivalence. Rather than compare the web to TV or radio I think it's more accurate to regard the internet as a medium then compare that to RF transmission. Just as we went from text communication (Morse code) to audio transmission to video transmission over radio waves, we've gone from email to RealPlayer to Youtube and beyond.
I do find it somewhat ironic that television evolved from over-the-air broadcast to direct-connect cable, while internet technologies have gone from landlines to WIFI and 5G.
TV is largely now just IP anyways so in a way we're kinda back.
5G internet is only really a thing because it's so much easier to run fiber to one tower. Than to broadcast it out for miles than it is to run fiber to everyone's doorstep. We switched from OTA to cable mostly because OTA sucked. But now that we've figured out long range, high bandwith, and most importantly high reliability RF we're happy to use it. But for most people their internet will stay wired because it's still the most reliable and fastest. The only people I know that use 5G home internet are in rural areas where the wired options suck, and my one co worker that's just a cheap ass and he hates it.
Chiming in to say the 5G home internet I have is great. Cheaper and faster than broadband. Live in a metropolitan area. Wish fiber was an option, still.
My co worker that hates it is in a downtown area and that's kinda why he hates it. 95% of the time it's great and he gets >300Mbps with low latency. But when there's a lot going on the network bogs down badly. Like if there's ever a major sportsball game it chugs. Latency throughout the day is pretty hit or miss, but it's normally fine as long as you're not trying to play an online game.
Coincidentally my co worker that's in a rural area has almost no issues because for whatever reason T-Mobile ran insanely good internet to his local tower and nobody is ever really on it so he pretty consistently gets great speeds. Suburbs might be good too since people are more spread out.
I'm in a rural area, super mountainous. Tmo has a tower near my home that allows for 5g home internet, but they won't let us use it. Say we're too far from the tower. So I signed up with a friend's address and use it anyway. It works great. My only other options for Internet are dial up, sat, or PCs for people, which use one of those old school hotspot boxes (it's income based, only 15 a month, and truly unlimited in case anyone is in need in the US). We used PCs for people for ages, but those boxes just aren't as capable, and it's pretty slow even with 4g/5g connection. Talking 3mbps was a really, really great day. I now get consistently 150-200mbps and have hit 250. It's the fastest internet I have ever had.
Yeah I have that same issue about once every 2 months. A few hours a day the internet just kills itself. Slow network speed and huge latency; online gaming is impossible, only good for streaming video at 720p. Learned it was because the home internet has less network priority than people using their phones so the phone users don't have call issues and such because some people are streaming 4K video or torrenting. Sucks majorly but thankfully rare in my situation. I live in a middle ground between urban and suburban, so great option for my situation. I can see why your co-worker living in a denser area hates it.
Throwing in RealPlayer really makes this work. The original bad-faith actor.
Interesting that there has yet to be a 'new' media to supplant internet. I wonder what it would look like, vr / ar doesn't seem to have any traction
First there were newspapers. Radio made it so that you didn’t have to read the newspaper yourself; someone would read it to you. And music! And drama! And line reporting on location! Radio encompassed everything that newspapers were, and added more.
Television added sight to sound. The visual layer increased the value of broadcast exponentially, while doing everything that radio and newspapers did.
The internet showed up. Now you could choose between all kinds of text, audio, video, interactive games, instant communication worldwide.
Then it became mobile. The portability of newspapers and transistor radios is widely available, but also for video and global communication.
There’s already been some hints at what might be the next step. Self driving cars build a digital representation of the world around them. Mapping software will give you arrow overlays as you walk, just from your having showed your phone the buildings around you. Google tried to put this on your face with Google Glass, but it was too early, not developed enough, maybe too interactive for its time.
The next thing is going to be an immersive digital representation of real things, created from sensors on the fly and also stored to be available to everyone. This will bring newspapers and radio and television and the mobile internet together, and add all real world objects, about which additional information can be easily accessed in real time.
And it will be exploitative as fuck.
That's terrifying. But not just because of how dystopian it was, but because I could envision a world with that same technology being so incredibly amazing, bordering on utopian.
As are newspapers, radio, television, and the mobile internet. As were chiseled stones and scribe-copied manuscripts. There is no means of communication that is immune from propaganda and exploitation.
Nothing has come along to replace the Internet because we didn't elect Al Gore, he hasn't had the platform to develop a replacement to his original invention of the Internet.
5G mesh stations in everyone’s backyard
"The internet" is a > layer 2 technology, radio and TV transmission would all be layer 2 if you applied the OSI model. And layer 2 tech has rapidly changed since the initial creation of the internet.
ARPANET started off on dedicated phone lines essentially (and maybe microwaves). When normal people started using it it was mostly done on their actual phone line with a modem. Then we started getting tech like ISDN, T1, DSL, cable and, Fiber. Nevermind internal networking which went through a wild ride in the 90s before setting on the twisted pair that we have now.
https://youtu.be/Hvqv9QcTcfA?t=93 I mean just look at how comically large an original "thicknet" cable was. It was like an inch thick.
It's funny. VR is AMAZING!!!!!!!!
I mean holy shit. Have you tried it? My first thought was "this is where software development is at, all else is weak". It's like LSD vs tapwater.
But it ain't convenient. I think that's the issue.
Until we have brainchips or video contacts or something.
Considering what STEMLords are like these days, I wouldn’t expect reasonable people to trust any of that brain implant shit ever. I will certainly be teaching my kids to say no to it.
I don’t know what kind of manipulation or mind control is even actually possible with current OR future tech, but to think it wouldn’t be used to the extent possible to exert control is via a brain implant is, at best, lacking “post-nut clarity” about the so-called Information Age.
While it's true that the internet is technically a closer peer of radio and TV, I think OP is right to focus on the web.
The web and email are the internet's main public applications. They're governed by open formats and protocols, just like the underlying internet is. In order to publish or to send, you don't need permission from anyone. That is not the case with social media or mobile OSs, which generally use closed-source software or proprietary protocols or both.
It's no coincidence that social platforms come and go but the web is still there, or that the "w" in the name is now generally spelled in lowercase just as happened with the "i" in Internet. Open standards always win in the end.