15 Internet

By Dave Bostwick

A little more than a decade ago, I taught a lesson about web searches to a group of graduating high school seniors who were using their own smartphones to experiment in class. I wanted to show them that Google search results often varied depending on data that Google had collected about individual users (and this is true for many platforms beyond Google).

At one point, I asked students to type their school mascot for a Google search. Several students attended a school with the panthers as their mascot, so they did a one-word search for panthers. The results were fascinating.

Some students saw a Wikipedia entry for panthers (the animals) at the top of their search results. Some students’ results included links related to the NFL’s Carolina Panthers. One young woman who was active in cheerleading saw several web pages about “Panther Cheerleaders” on her page-one search results.

At the top of one Black student’s search was a link to information about the Black Panther political party, which gained prominence while advocating for Black rights in the 1960s. This student had never heard of the Black Panthers until that day in my class.

Keep in mind this was a few years before the Marvel movie The Black Panther, and the search results would no doubt yield different results today.

Nonetheless, this incident helps me establish my opening point for this chapter. The internet has evolved to make our mass media consumption customized and personalized. We peruse popular media platforms to locate content that algorithms suggest to us. On the other hand, the internet can create partitions among Americans based on their interests and beliefs.

It’s a trend that’s not likely to end soon. During the 2024 World Economic Forum, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said future AI tools will give different responses to users based on their locations and opinions. Altman, who is the founder of ChatGPT, added, “That’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable.”

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

As we’ve studied in previous chapters, radio, magazines and television all evolved to become more specialized. One could argue that the internet has taken us from specialization to personalization because much of the internet content we see is based on our personal information and data.

The internet is a broad concept, and we could cover several chapters about connectivity and terminology. Instead, though, we’ll devote this one chapter to a basic understanding of the following:

• Brief history of the internet’s birth and evolution
• General idea of how the internet works
• Ethical and psychological concerns for society

Thanks to the internet, we have streaming video, so parts of this chapter will rely on Google’s YouTube to deliver key perspectives.

IN THE BEGINNING

I’m sure the pioneers of the World Wide Web did not envision that one day Americans would get news updates through a vaping device.

With that in mind, let’s start with a brief explanatory history video, courtesy of Interesting Engineering. Making it perhaps appropriate for this chapter, the video has a snappy, informal and slightly snarky style with animated graphics, as opposed to a more polished TV or movie documentary format.

One takeaway from the video: The internet is an open-ended technology that began as a means for researchers to share information securely and more efficiently. Much like radio, the internet did not begin as a medium for entertainment.

THAT’S THE INTERNET

The internet has rapidly evolved to become an essential part of Americans’ lives for job applications, education and daily communication. Next, here’s a short animated video from Blaster Technology that explains how the internet works. It includes a brief overview of how DNS technology resembles an old-fashioned phone book by associating an IP address with a lettered address (such as google.com).

You can also watch a longer, fully produced video from Vox titled “How Does the Internet Work? Glad You Asked.” Here are a few key quotes from the Vox video:

• “The cloud is a marketing term.” In fact, the internet is also a physical space that includes undersea cables, wires, hubs and routers.
• “At its most basic, a cell phone is a radio.” Binary information [ones and zeros] is sent through a router instead of a radio receiver.
• “There are lots of people that still don’t have reliable internet access.” Although internet access is a daily necessity for many Americans, it’s more of a luxury in some other countries.

THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

Much of this chapter will focus on ethical and psychological issues related to the internet. We’ll start with the digital divide.

Americans who can afford smartphones, tablets and computers typically have no problems staying informed. That is not the case for some low-income Americans, especially after the federal Affordable Connectivity Program expired in 2024.

The State of Local News Project at Northwestern University suggested that wealthier, urban Americans have access to more local news. Previous research also showed that a reliable internet connection was essential for many Americans during the pandemic, but not everyone could afford it.

As more of our daily media content becomes digital, including textbooks and government documents, a primary concern is that Americans who can’t afford high-speed internet access and smart devices will be at an informational disadvantage compared to wealthier Americans.

The digital divide is even more noticeable when you compare internet access among countries worldwide.

POPULARITY vs. QUALITY

An MIT Technology Review article about how Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation included the following chart based on information that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg shared in 2018.

The chart illustrates why it can be so difficult for social media platforms and websites to regulate users’ posts and minimize harm. The most popular content is often the closest to violating community standards. Social media and search algorithms tend to reward popularity. Consumers may say they dislike controversial posts and disinformation, but many of them are still lured by clickbait headlines and thus view misleading information or hate speech.

In 2020, New York Times’ Shira Ovide made an observation about Zuckerberg’s chart that seems pertinent to this chapter:

“… no matter where Facebook drew the line at activity that went too far — dangerous lies, bullying, calls for violence, sexually suggestive photos — people tended to post material that went right up to the line. And they did that because, again, people found it engaging.”

CONNECTING THE WORLD?

In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s goal from “connecting the world” to “giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Steven Levy of Wired magazine argued that the resulting changes made to Facebook’s own algorithms seemed to “pump up membership” in extremist groups, contributing greatly to the D.C. insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

Another New York Times article by Ovide said that Facebook does not reflect reality. It included the following observation: 

“Facebook sells billions of dollars in ads each year because what people see there, and how Facebook chooses to prioritize that information, can influence what people believe and buy.”

Beyond Facebook, this observation applies more broadly to most social media platforms.

More recently, consider how governments pass laws in attempts to control what their citizens see on the internet and social media, including in China. We’ve certainly seen that in U.S. debates about social media censorship and TikTok, but it’s even more evident beyond U.S. borders. The New York Times reported on how other countries are copying China’s online blockade.

ONLINE CHILD SAFETY

In the past decade, social media executives have frequently been accused of ignoring the potential dangers for children who use social media platforms, including psychological damage, addiction and sexploitation. A New York Times article cited government documents showing that Meta rejected efforts to improve children’s safety.

In January 2024, U.S. senators questioned executives from five companies –  Meta, TikTok, X, Snap and Discord – about online child safety. A few senators even compared social media companies to cigarette makers. The most dramatic moment came when Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley spoke to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (and remember from a previous chapter that Facebook is part of the Meta conglomerate).

Despite the drama in the video clip above, U.S. senators and representatives have struggled over the years to pass meaningful legislation to protect children online and safeguard all users’ data. This has allowed social media platforms to operate with minimal federal regulations, although a few states have passed their own laws.

For example, in 2023, Arkansas passed the Social Media Safety Act, which required age verification for social media usage and imposed penalties on companies that retain user data illegally and do not verify users’ ages. However, legal challenges, financed by social media companies and based partly on free speech rights, initially blocked the Arkansas law’s implementation.

Similarly, the U.S. Congress passed a national ban or forced sale of TikTok which was signed by the president, but the legislation may not survive legal challenges.

IF YOU AREN’T THE CUSTOMER, YOU’RE THE PRODUCT

When we use social media, search engines and websites, we typically allow companies to collect data about our internet usage, such as sites we visit and items we search for. As a trade-off for much of our online content being free, we see lots of ads that can be based on the data that companies have collected about us.

You can say, then, that each American internet user is a product that can be sold to advertisers.

Below is a partial screenshot of Privacy Badger, a browser extension I sometimes use to see hidden trackers that monitor my web browsing activity on various sites. The screenshot shows that, in this case, there were 46 potential trackers connected to a single web page that I visited.

As the Privacy Badger screenshot illustrates, trackers want to invisibly send information about our internet usage to advertisers and data brokers.

Online tracking isn’t always a bad thing, though. Here’s a kinder explanation from the All About Cookies website:

When you visit a website, it gives your browser a cookie to store in a cookie file that’s placed in your browser’s folder on your hard drive. The next time you visit the same website, the browser will give back the cookie to identify you. Then the website loads with a personalized experience.

Online tracking and cookies can help advertisers and public relations professionals measure effectiveness. For example, here are two website addresses that will in theory take readers to the same New York Times article.

ADDRESS 1 – https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/magazine/movies-theaters-streaming.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20240127&instance_id=113638&nl=the-morning&regi_id=96912916&segment_id=156565&te=1&user_id=3544579ce1fb22c0827e722878b6f520

ADDRESS 2 – https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/magazine/movies-theaters-streaming.html

Why is the first address longer? The first address enables tracking. After the letters html, the first address is coded so that media trackers can collect data about how many people click on the link (which was originally embedded in an email newsletter) and where individual visitors go on the website after they click on the link. (Note: For privacy concerns, I altered a few numbers and letters in the user_id of the first address before publishing this chapter.)

POPULARITY CONTEST

We’ll wrap up this chapter with a video from Data Is Beautiful charting the most popular websites from 1995 to 2023. The video shows “worldwide data based on websites traffic measured by monthly visits or sessions.”

Consider how valuable it can be for a platform to gain users’ loyalty as their initial landing spot for online interactions. In the video above, you’ll note the top slot shifted from America Online (AOL.com) to Yahoo to Google as the Internet moved from mostly human-curated content in the heyday of Yahoo to algorithms beginning with Google. That trend will likely continue so that we’ll see some embedded advertising in AI-generated search results.

Although the video shows lots of chart movement until 2012, Google then claimed the top spot for the remainder of the decade and beyond, while Facebook and YouTube battled for the second and third positions and all other platforms lagged far behind.

That doesn’t mean Google will remain entrenched at the top. For example, in 2024 OpenAI launched a prototype of SearchGPT as an alternative to Google’s linked search results.

NOTE: Due to the range of screen sizes (computers, tablets, smartphones) and platforms (websites, mobile apps), metrics used to gauge online traffic across multiple years are imprecise. The video above is merely intended to illustrate broad trends.

CLOSING PERSPECTIVE

If you are a prisoner of the moment, you may think that most mass media content was reliable back in the good old days before the internet ruined everything with fake news. As we’ve studied several times in this OER text, that’s an oversimplification. Here’s an additional perspective from The Gutenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis:

But it is important to recognize that many of the problems attributed to the internet are ultimately human problems, our failings. We bring to the net a long unbroken history of racism, misogyny, mistrust, and fear. The net did not suddenly teach us to hate. Turn off the internet tomorrow and the hate will still burn.

On the other hand, the internet gave more people a means to express their ideas and feelings. It has even given some of us hope that, collectively, we can improve the world through our evolving media tools.