Foot: An Oral History of the Internet

I really had no desire to read this article about the history of the internet at first. I thought it was going to be filled with a lot technology terms that I wouldn’t understand and I really didn’t expect it to keep my attention. I was surprised that after a few paragraphs the article started to grab my attention. It shocked me that the building blocks for the internet started back in the 1960s. I was also surprised that the United States government had a lot to do with the origins of the internet. I had always assumed that the internet was created by some genesis one day. I just assumed the idea was something that came to someone over night, which is a little silly when you look at how complex the internet is. I liked when the article talked about the emergence of the internet into everyday life. It made me think back to how my teachers started to incorporate the internet into projects at school. I remember when I was first learning to research and write papers that I had to have so many sources and out of those sources two of them had to be internet sources. I remember thinking that it was such a pain to use the internet because I would have to either use the school library or go to my community library to use the internet. By the end high school, a lot had changed. My teachers were then telling me that I had to have at least two book sources in my papers. The internet had become the new source of information on everything.

Another thing that stood out to me as I was reading was how relatively new most of the internet is. Goggle, Ebay, and Craigslist are all a huge part of the internet and the oldest of the three was created in 1998. I think this article did a good job of showing me how the internet has changed over the years. As teachers, I think it is important for us to remember that as the internet changes, we need to change and adapt with it.