Academic growth - Online encyclopedia’s/Academic search engines

Access to academic search engines and online encyclopedia’s has had a very large impact on the growth of the internet for a number of reasons. Academic search engines like Google scholar are freely accessible websites which “indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines”. The search engine allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether online or in libraries.  Online encyclopedias allow users to find background information on any topic they need whether they are just interested in something or just need it for background information on a research topic.

These academic tools have influenced greatly to the growth of the internet because they have allowed free access to a lot of information while also making it easier. Now instead of having to go to a physical library and searching through hundreds of books you just type in the few words or phrase in a search bar to be shown thousands of results.

Mobile devices

Mobile technology has advanced rapidly ever since the first mobile phone – or the brick was created. They now boast features such as camera’s and video recorders as well as internet access and loads of interactive games to choose from. These devices have changed the way that people use the internet massively. With these tools anyone can connect to the internet and other services anywhere, because people now regularly access a multitude of websites, the website designers have now had to start making mobile versions, which makes browsing easier. It has improved the internet’s capacity as they have had to create two different forms of the website. 

Search engines

A search engine is a site which has been developed to make your life easier. They search the web and gather all of the relevant pages for the set of keyword which you typed into the search bar. The searches can be anything from very simple one word ones to ones which are specialised using the advanced search tool.  These sites have become the few which are the most visited in the world. For many of us it has become a force of nature to go onto these sites like Google as soon as you start up the internet and then take it from there.

The search engines have contributed to the technological growth of the internet because before they were around to make our life easier, you either had to guess the URL of the website you wanted or you would have to trawl through simple directories, using up a lot of your time. As well as this, they have become so used and well known ‘Google’ has become a common word in the English language and many people now refer to looking for something on the internet by ‘Google it’.

Domain names

The domain name system is essentially a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services or any resource connected to the internet or a private network. It associated various information which the domain names instead of the IP addresses. An IP address were a series of numbers and letters. The users of the internet would have to remember these to get onto a particular page, whereas now they only have to remember a name which is much easier.

These domain name servers made the internet able to access the pages we want as quickly as we do know. This is how the domain name server helped to contribute to the technological growth of the internet, with the speed. We only have the speeds which we know and expect of our internet because of domain names. 

Technological growth - Packet switching

The first concept of sending small blocks of data was originally explored by Paul Baran in the early 1960s. The idea of sending information in packets was coincidentally also developed in the UK a few years later by Donald Davies and the National Physical Laboratory.

Packet switching is where a piece of information is split up into multiple packets. Each of these smaller packets is assigned a ‘header’.  The header contains a network IP address, which it needs to arrive to and it also has the details of the IP address from which it was sent so that if anything goes wrong it can be returned safely. The header also gives each packet a number and records how many packets the data was split up into, this allows for the maximum security which it can do.

This has contributed to the growth of the internet because it has allowed for a much securer connection  for sending you personal details over the internet and has also widened what we use the internet for. 

On-line gaming

Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are the three major online gaming names which everyone has heard of. These systems have greatly influenced the way in which we use the internet and thus its growth, by allowing gamers to challenge someone around the world to a game which communicating between themselves as they do so.

A lot of the games you play now are either on Xbox live, which has a grand total of 20 million users, or the PlayStation network which has 17 million users. These networks offer co-operative play where you can group up with a load of friends or a group of people you have never met before, and work towards a common cause.

This technology has had a massive impact on the social growth of the internet because it has allowed people to make friends who share the same hobby as you – online gaming. However, it can be a verbally abusive thing to be involved in because of the anonymous player who like to use their screen name as a shield.

E-mail

Email has become the main communication method, which everyone now is expected to use. Since it was developed in 1973 is has developed again a massive user following and has greatly reduced the need of paper letters in everyday life. The basic function of it is that it allows the customers who have signed up to allow people to send messages anywhere in the world at either very little or no cost.

As it has developed from only sending text based messages to sending messages containing attached files and messages which have been formatted to make them look more attractive, they have changed the internet with their pure potential. We are able to share articles and passages with our friends, forward important email with your work colleagues or even write to you pen friend in a foreign country without using the more traditional pen and paper.