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Media constructions of culture, race, and ethnicity.

Travis L. Dixon , Travis L. Dixon Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Kristopher R. Weeks Kristopher R. Weeks Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
and Marisa A. Smith Marisa A. Smith Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.502
Published online: 23 May 2019

Racial stereotypes flood today’s mass media. Researchers investigate these stereotypes’ prevalence, from news to entertainment. Black and Latino stereotypes draw particular concern, especially because they misrepresent these racial groups. From both psychological and sociological perspectives, these misrepresentations can influence how people view their racial group as well as other groups. Furthermore, a racial group’s lack of representation can also reduce the group’s visibility to the general public. Such is the case for Native Americans and Asian Americans.

Given mass media’s widespread distribution of black and Latino stereotypes, most research on mediated racial portrayals focuses on these two groups. For instance, while black actors and actresses appear often in prime-time televisions shows, black women appear more often in situational comedies than any other genre. Also, when compared to white actors and actresses, television casts blacks in villainous or despicable roles at a higher rate. In advertising, black women often display Eurocentric features, like straight hair. On the other hand, black men are cast as unemployed, athletic, or entertainers. In sports entertainment, journalists emphasize white athletes’ intelligence and black athletes’ athleticism. In music videos, black men appear threatening and sport dark skin tones. These music videos also sexualize black women and tend to emphasize those with light skin tones. News media overrepresent black criminality and exaggerate the notion that blacks belong to the undeserving poor class. Video games tend to portray black characters as either violent outlaws or athletic.

While mass media misrepresent the black population, it tends to both misrepresent and underrepresent the Latino population. When represented in entertainment media, Latinos assume hypersexualized roles and low-occupation jobs. Both news and entertainment media overrepresent Latino criminality. News outlets also overly associate Latino immigration with crime and relate Latino immigration to economic threat. Video games rarely portray Latino characters.

Creators may create stereotypic content or fail to fairly represent racial and ethnic groups for a few reasons. First, the ethnic blame discourse in the United States may influence creators’ conscious and unconscious decision-making processes. This discourse contends that the ethnic and racial minorities are responsible for their own problems. Second, since stereotypes appeal to and are easily processed by large general audiences, the misrepresentation of racial and ethnic groups facilitates revenue generation. This article largely discusses media representations of blacks and Latinos and explains the implications of such portrayals.

content analysis
African American portrayals
Latino portrayals
ethnic blame discourse
structural limitations and economic interests
social identity theory
Clark’s Stage Model of Representations

Theoretical Importance of Media Stereotypes

Media constructions of culture, race, and ethnicity remain important to study because of their potential impact on both sociological and psychological phenomena. Specifically, researchers have utilized two major theoretical constructs to understand the potential impact of stereotyping: (a) priming and cognitive accessibility (Dixon, 2006 ; Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007 ; Shrum, 2009 ), and (b) social identity and social categorization theory (Mastro, 2004 ; Mastro, Behm-Morawitz, & Kopacz, 2008 ; Tajfel & Turner, 2004 ).

Priming and Cognitive Accessibility

Priming and cognitive accessibility suggests that media consumption encourages the creation of mental shortcuts used to make relevant judgments about various social issues. For example, if a news viewer encounters someone cognitively related to a given stereotype, he or she might make a judgment about that person based on repeated exposure to the mediated stereotype. As an illustration, repeated exposure to the Muslim terrorist stereotype may lead news viewers to conclude that all Muslims are terrorists. This individual may also support punitive policies related to this stereotype, such as a Muslim ban on entry to the United States. Therefore, this cognitive linkage influences race and crime judgments (e.g., increased support for criminalizing Muslims and deporting them).

Social Identity Theory and Media Judgments

Other scholars have noted that our own identities are often tied to how people perceive their groups’ relationships to other groups. Social categorization theory argues that the higher the salience of the category to the individual, the greater the in-group favoritism one will demonstrate. Media scholars demonstrated that exposure to a mediated out-group member can increase in-group favoritism (Mastro, 2004 ). For example, researchers found that negative stories about Latino immigrants can contribute to negative out-group emotions that lead to support for harsher immigration laws (Atwell Seate & Mastro, 2016 , 2017 ).

Both the priming/cognitive accessibility approach and the social identity approach demonstrate that cultural stereotypes have significant implications for our psychology, social interactions, and policymaking. It remains extremely important for us to understand the nature and frequency of mediated racial and ethnic stereotypes to further our understanding of how these stereotypes impact viewers. This article seeks to facilitate our understanding.

Stage Model of Representation

In order to provide the reader with an introduction to this topic, this article relies on the published content-analytic literature regarding race and media. Clark’s Stage Model of Representation articulates a key organizing principle for understanding how media may construct various depictions of social groups (Clark, 1973 ; Harris, 2013 ). This model purports that race/ethnic groups move through four stages of representation in the media. In the first stage, invisibility or non-recognition , a particular race or ethnic group rarely appears on the screen at all. In the second stage, ridicule , a racial group will appear more frequently, yet will be depicted in consistently stereotypical ways. In the third stage, regulation , an ethnic group might find themselves depicted primarily in roles upholding the social order, such as judges or police officers. Finally, a particular social group reaches the respect stage in which members of the group occupy diverse and nuanced roles. Given Clark’s model, this article contends that Native Americans and Asian Americans tend to fall into the non-recognition stage (Harris, 2013 ). It follows that few empirical studies have investigated these groups because empirical content analyses have difficulty scientifically assessing phenomena that lack presence (Krippendorff, 2004 ).

Bearing in mind Clark’s stages, Latinos appear to vacillate between non-recognition and ridicule. Meanwhile, blacks move between the ridicule and regulation stages, while whites remain permanently fixed in the respect stage. In other words, in this article, our lack of deep consideration of Native Americans and Asian Americans is rooted in a lack of representation which generates few empirical studies and thus leaves us little to review. The article offers a quick overview of their portrayal and then moves on to describe the social groups that receive more media and empirical attention.

Native American and Asian American Depictions

Although severely underrepresented, there are a few consistent stereotypical portrayals that regularly emerge for these groups. In some ways, both Native American and Asian Americans are often relegated to “historical” and/or fetishized portrayals (Lipsitz, 1998 ). Native American “savage” imagery was commonly depicted in Westerns and has been updated with images of alcoholism, along with depictions of shady Native American casino owners (Strong, 2004 ). Many news images of Native Americans tend to focus on Native festivals, relegating this group to a presentation as “mysterious” spiritual people (Heider, 2000 ). Meanwhile, various school and professional team mascots embody the savage Native American Warrior trope (Strong, 2004 ).

Asian Americans overall have often been associated with being the model minority (Harris, 2009 ; Josey, Hurley, Hefner, & Dixon, 2009 ). They typically represent “successful” non-whites. Specifically, media depictions associate Asian American men with technology and Asian American women with sexual submissiveness (Harris & Barlett, 2009 ; Schug, Alt, Lu, Gosin, & Fay, 2017 ).

Overall, scholars know very little about how either of these groups are regularly portrayed based on empirical research, although novelists and critical scholars have offered useful critiques (Wilson, Gutiérrez, & Chao, 2003 ). Hopefully, future quantitative content analyses will further delineate the nature of Native American and Asian American portrayals. Consider the discussion about entertainment, news, and digital imagery of blacks, Latinos, and whites presented in the next section.

Entertainment Constructions of Race, Culture, and Ethnicity

Entertainment media receives a great deal of consideration, given that Americans spend much of their time using media for entertainment purposes (Harris, 2013 ; Sparks, 2016 ). This section begins with an analysis of black portrayals, then moves on to Latino portrayals to understand the prevalence of stereotyping . When appropriate, black and Latino representations are compared to white ones. Two measures describe a group’s representation: (a) the numerical presence of a particular racial/ethnic group, and (b) the distribution of roles or stereotypes regarding each group. When researchers have often engaged in examinations of race they typically begin by comparing African American portrayals to white portrayals (Entman & Rojecki, 2000 ). As a result, there is a substantial amount of research on black portrayals.

Black Entertainment Television Imagery

Overall, a number of studies have found that blacks receive representation in prime-time television at parity to their actual proportion in the US population with their proportion ranging from 10% to 17% of prime-time characters (Mastro & Greenberg, 2000 ; Signorielli, 2009 ; Tukachinsky, Mastro, & Yarchi, 2015 ). African Americans currently compose approximately 13% of the US population (US Census Bureau, 2018 ). When considering the type of characters (e.g., major or minor) portrayed by this group, the majority of black (61%) cast members land roles as major characters (Monk-Turner, Heiserman, Johnson, Cotton, & Jackson, 2010 ). Black women also fare well in these representations, accounting for 73% of black appearances on prime-time television (Monk-Turner et al., 2010 ).

However, recent content analyses reveal an instability in black prime-time television representation over the last few decades. Tukachinsky et al. ( 2015 ) found that the prevalence of black characters dropped in 1993 and remain diminished compared to previous decades. Similarly, Signorielli ( 2009 ) found a significant linear decrease in the proportion of black representation from 2001 (17%) to 2008 (12%). Signorielli ( 2009 ) attributes this decrease in black representation to the decrease in situation comedy programming. Indeed, African Americans appear most frequently in situation comedies. Sixty percent of black women featured in prime-time television are cast in situation comedies, and 25% of black male prime-time portrayals occur in situation comedies (Signorielli, 2009 ). However, between 2001 and 2008 , situational comedies decreased, while action and crime programs increased.

The previously discussed analyses describe the frequency of black representation. However, frequent depictions do not equate to favorable representation. Considering role quality (i.e., respectability) and references made to stereotypes, entertainment media offers a mixed bag. On the one hand, some recent analyses found that the majority of blacks are depicted as likable, and as “good characters,” as opposed to “bad character”-like villains (Tukachinsky, Mastro, & Yarchi, 2015 ). In addition, the majority of black characters are depicted as intelligent (Tukachinsky et al., 2015 ). On the other hand, the rate of blacks shown as immoral and despicable (9%) is higher than that of whites (2% and 3%, respectively) (Monk-Turner et al., 2010 ). In addition, black depictions exhibiting high social status and professionalism trended downward. Between 2003 and 2005 , higher status depictions reached their peak at 74.3% but sharply fell in subsequent years to 31.5%, with black women faring worse than black men (Tukachinsky et al., 2015 ). Classic studies of entertainment representations found that blacks tend to be the most negatively represented of any race or ethnic group, often being depicted as lazy and disheveled (Mastro & Greenberg, 2000 ). Overall, black characters tend to be portrayed in less respectful ways compared to whites in content intended for general audiences, although they sometime fare better when the targeted audience is African American (Messineo, 2008 ). For example, crime drama television frequently depicts white women as at risk for murder, but FBI statistics demonstrate that murder victims are more often likely to be black males (Parrott & Parrott, 2015 ).

Black Representations in Magazines and Advertising

African Americans remain well represented in magazines, though they are not as prominent in this medium as in television (Schug et al., 2017 ). Moreover, the trend in the representation of African Americans, particularly women, appears to be improving (Covert & Dixon, 2008 ). Images of black women represent 6% of advertisements in women’s magazines and 4% of advertisements in men’s magazines (Baker, 2005 ). However, both black-oriented and white-oriented magazines appear to advance portrayals of black women with Eurocentric rather than Afrocentric features, referencing whiteness as a beauty standard. Overall, compared to black-oriented magazines, white-oriented magazines feature more black women with fair skin and thin figures. Black-oriented magazines feature more black women with straight hair. Moreover, straight hair textures outnumber other natural styles (i.e., wavy, curly, or braided) in both white- and black-oriented magazines.

Conversely, black men typically assume unemployed, athletic, or entertainment roles in these ads (Bailey, 2006 ). Moreover, mainstream magazines are most likely to depict black men as unemployed. Meanwhile, black-oriented magazines tend to portray African Americans in more managerial roles.

Black Representations in Sports Entertainment

Besides prime-time television, black stereotypes in sports coverage and music receive substantial attention in the literature. The unintelligent or “dumb” yet naturally talented black athlete remains a programming staple (Angelini, Billings, MacArthur, Bissell, & Smith, 2014 ; Rada & Wulfemeyer, 2005 ). For example, Angelini et al. ( 2014 ) found that black athletes receive less success-based comments related to intelligence than white athletes (Angelini et al., 2014 ). The findings echo previous research arguing that black athletes receive fewer positive comments regarding their intelligence than do white athletes (Rada & Wulfemeyer, 2005 ). Fairly similar depictions exist in broadcast commentary (Primm, DuBois, & Regoli, 2007 ). For example, Mercurio and Filak ( 2010 ) content-analyzed descriptions of NFL quarterback prospects featured on the Sports Illustrated website from 1998 to 2007 . The descriptions portray black athletes as possessing physical abilities while lacking intelligence . Conversely, Sports Illustrated described white prospects as intelligent but lacking in athleticism.

Black Representations in Music Videos

Music videos tend to sexualize black women, reinforcing the black jezebe l stereotype (i.e., a sassy African American woman who is sexually promiscuous) (Givens & Monahan, 2005 ). Also, black men appear aggressive and violent in music videos (e.g., like a criminal, thug, or brute ) (Ford, 1997 ). According to rap research, blacks appear in provocative clothes at a higher rate than whites, and black women are the most provocatively dressed in music videos (Turner, 2011 ). Even black female artists are twice as likely to wear provocative clothing than are white female artists (Frisby & Aubrey, 2012 ). Furthermore, Zhang, Dixon, and Conrad ( 2010 ) and Conrad, Zhang, and Dixon ( 2009 ) found that black women appeared in rap videos as sexualized, thin, and light-skinned while black men appeared dark-skinned and threatening .

Latino Entertainment Television Representation

Unlike African Americans, Latinos remain significantly underrepresented in English-language television outlets. For instance, Tukachinsky et al. ( 2015 ) found that of all characters, the number of Latino characters was less than 1% in the 1980s and increased to over 3% in the 2000s. However, these numbers fall significantly below the proportion of people who are Latino within the United States (about 18%) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018 ). Similarly, Signorelli ( 2009 ) also found that the percentage of Latinos in the United States Latino population and the percentage of Latino characters in prime-time programming differed by approximately 10%.

Latinos continue to be underrepresented in a variety of genres and outlets. For instance, Latinos remain consistently underrepresented in gay male blogs. For example, Grimm and Schwarz ( 2017 ) found that white gay models (80.2%) were most prevalent, followed by black gay models (4.5%). However, Latino models were the least prevalent (1.5%). In addition, Hetsroni ( 2009 ) found that the Latino population makes up 14% of patients in real hospitals, yet they only comprise 4% of the patients in hospital dramas. Conversely, whites make up 72% of real patients but comprise 80% of hospital drama patients.

Latino Underrepresentation in Advertising

Latino underrepresentation extends to the advertising realm. For example, Seelig ( 2007 ) determined that there was a significant difference between the Latino proportion of the US population and the Latino proportion of models found in mainstream magazines (1%). Another study that investigated Superbowl commercials conducted by Brooks, Bichard, and Craig ( 2016 ) found that only 1.22% of the characters were Latino.

Prominent Stereotypes of Latinos in Entertainment Media

Although underrepresented, Latinos are also stereotypically represented in entertainment media. For example, Tukachinsky et al. ( 2015 ) discovered that over 24% of Latino characters were hypersexualized in prime-time television. Furthermore, Latinos tended to occupy low-professional-status roles. This trend also occurred more often with Latina females than Latino males.

Spanish-language television also reinforced stereotypes. For instance, Mastro and Ortiz ( 2008 ) studied the portrayals of characters in prime-time Spanish-language television broadcasts by Azteca America, Telefutura, Telemundo, and Univision. They found rich Latina women reinforced the harlot stereotype . They were sexualized , were provocatively dressed, and had slim body types (Mastro & Behm-Morawitz, 2005 ). Similar to the findings for African Americans and rap music, colorism was also part of these depictions, with idealized Latinos having more European features. Men with a dark complexion were depicted as aggressive (e.g., the criminal stereotype) , while men with a fair complexion were portrayed as intelligent and articulate.

Entertainment Imagery Summary

Blacks appear to be well represented in entertainment imagery, often in favorable major roles as professionals. However, their positive portrayals appear to be on the decline as situation comedies become displaced by other genres where blacks are less prominent. Although well represented, black depictions continue to embody many stereotypes. African American males are portrayed as unintelligent or “dumb” athletes whose only assets are their inbred athletic abilities. Black men tend to appear as aggressive criminals or brutes in music videos while black women appear as sexualized jezebels with European features.

Latinos, on the other hand, face substantial obstacles related to their lack of representation. They tend to be grossly underrepresented across a number of entertainment outlets including television, magazines, and advertising. When they are seen, they tend to occupy two primary stereotypes, the harlot stereotype and the criminal stereotype. This appears to be a constant across both Spanish-language and English-language outlets.

News Constructions of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity

News remains an important area to consider when it comes to media stereotypes for two reasons. First, news can be considered a powerful purveyor of social truth (Romer, Jamieson, & Aday, 2003 ; Tewksbury & Rittenberg, 2012 ). While entertainment can be considered by lay audiences to have a weak relationship with social reality given its fictional nature, news is rooted in actual events, and therefore seems more real. Stereotypes found in news content may seem believable, increasing these stereotype’s influence on audiences’ perceptions of reality. Second, citizens rely on news to form opinions about policies and politicians (Iyengar, 1987 ; Price & Tewksbury, 1997 ). News reports contain the reservoir of information that citizens utilize to make decisions within our representative democracy (Iyengar, 1991 ). If the news falsely points to racial groups as the cause of social problems, these citizens may advocate for ineffective and misguided policies. The next section explores how the news purveys racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Blacks in the News

A number of early studies suggested that the news often stereotyped blacks as violent criminals , consistently overrepresenting them in these roles by large margins (Dixon, Azocar, & Casas, 2003 ; Dixon & Linz, 2000a , 2000b ; Entman, 1992 , 1994 ). At the same time, many of these studies showed blacks underrepresented in more sympathetic roles, such as victims of crime (Dixon & Linz, 2000a , 2000b ).

However, recent research suggests that the criminal stereotype has not remained consistently part of the news landscape. For example, Dixon ( 2017b ) found that current depictions of blacks in local news reflect actual percentages of blacks in these various roles, including as criminals. Similarly, Dixon and Williams ( 2015 ) found African Americans underrepresented as both criminals and victims. On the other hand, another recent content analysis that investigated black family depictions in the news, conducted by Dixon ( 2017a ), found that black family members were overrepresented as criminal suspects compared to crime reports.

Furthermore, Mastro, Blecha, and Atwell Seate ( 2011 ) content-analyzed articles pertaining to athletes’ criminal activity published in newspapers and found that mentions of black athletes’ criminal activity outnumber white and Latino athletes. Furthermore, mentions of criminal activity among black athletes outnumber their real-world proportion in professional sports (Mastro et al., 2011 ). In addition, crime articles discussing black athletes provide more explicit details of the crime and mention more negative consequences (e.g., jail or fines) than articles regarding white athletes. News narratives also present less sympathetic coverage for black athletes, more support for the victim, a less respectful tone, and fewer thematic frames (i.e., situating the crime in a larger context) for black athletes compared to white athletes.

Besides criminality , news tends to also depict blacks as part of the underserving poor . For example, van Doorn ( 2015 ) content-analyzed images depicting poverty in news magazines (i.e., Time, Newsweek , and USNWR ). News magazines picture blacks as the majority of persons in poverty (52%), while blacks only account for around 25% of Americans in poverty (van Doorn, 2015 ). Blacks experience similar misrepresentations as welfare recipients . Based on magazine depictions, black people comprise 55% of all welfare recipients. However, in reality, blacks only account for 38% of welfare recipients. Furthermore, the black elderly are depicted as only accounting for 1% of poor elderly persons pictured, while the true percentage is 6%. In addition, during times of economic stability, African American association with poverty increases, but during times of economic upheaval (e.g., the Great Recession) white association with poverty goes up.

Latinos in the News

If there is an overarching issue to consider regarding Latino depictions in news, it would again be their perpetual underrepresentation. Overall, Latinos remain severely underrepresented on television news, especially in sympathetic roles. For example, early studies by Dixon and Linz ( 2000a , 2000b ) found Latinos were underrepresented as perpetrators, victims, and police officers in the news. In one of these studies, Latinos were 54% of the homicide victims in Los Angeles County but were depicted as homicide victims only about 19% of the time on television news. A recent update to this study found that Latinos were accurately represented as perpetrators, but continued to be underrepresented as victims and police officers (Dixon, 2017b ). This invisibility extends to newspapers and magazines (Sorenson, Manz, & Berk, 1998 ). For example, Latinos are underrepresented in Time and Newsweek as part of the obese population, 5% in these magazines versus 18% according to medical statistics (Gollust, Eboh, & Barry, 2012 ).

When we considered the pervasive stereotype that is present with Latinos, it revolved around the issue of immigration and Latino immigrants as criminal or cultural threats . For instance, a meta-analysis (i.e., a type of method that unearths patterns of academic research) by Rendon and Johnson ( 2015 ) on studies that analyzed media coverage of Mexican affairs in the United States revealed a Threat Phase, from 2010 to 2014 . During this phase, reporters investigated the notion that immigrant Mexicans imperil the United States. Furthermore, Chavez, Whiteford, and Hoewe ( 2010 ) found that more than half of analyzed stories concerning Mexican immigration from the New York Times , Washington Post , Wall Street Journal , and USA Today focused on illegal immigration. Furthermore, within these immigration stories, crime was addressed most often (50.6%), followed by economics (e.g., job competition) (30.6%), and legislative deliberations (28.1%). Similarly, Branton and Dunaway ( 2008 ) found that English-language newspapers were almost twice as likely as Spanish-language news to depict immigration in a negative light.

Kim, Carvahlo, Davis, and Mullins ( 2011 ) found that illegal immigration stories produced by the media focus on the negative consequences of crime and job competition. A more recent study conducted by Dixon and Williams ( 2015 ) appears to confirm the media link between immigration, Latinos, and criminal behavior. They found that criminal suspects identified as immigrants in news stories were greatly overrepresented as Latino. In addition, almost all of the illegal or undocumented immigrants appearing in the news were depicted as Latino, which is a great overrepresentation based on official government reports. Dunaway, Goidel, Krizinger, and Wilkinson ( 2011 ) confirm that news coverage encourages an immigration threat narrative, meaning that the majority of immigration stories exhibit a negative tone.

Whites as the “Good Guys”

While black representations as criminal suspects does appear to vary in intensity and Latinos tend to be depicted as either invisible or threatening immigrants, white portrayals remain consistently positive in this domain. Classic studies of both news and reality-based programming show whites overrepresented as officers and victims (Dixon et al., 2003 ; Dixon & Linz, 2000a , 2000b ; Oliver, 1994 ). This includes network and local news programs. More recent studies show that this continues to occur regularly and remains a news programming staple (Dixon, 2017b ). When contrasted with black and Latino representations, this reinforces the notion that whites resolve social problems and people of color create social problems.

Summary of News Constructions of Culture, Race, and Media

Based on this literature review, three significant findings that summarize news’ construction of race and ethnicity emerge. First, African Americans tend to be overly associated with criminality and poverty . However, the intensity of these portrayals depends on context (e.g., a focus on families, athletes, or general economic conditions). Second, Latinos tend to be largely underrepresented, but when they are seen, they tend to be overly associated with problematic illegal immigration , especially immigrants who may pose a threat or be prone to criminality. Third, news depicts whites most favorably, overrepresenting them as victims (e.g., innocent portrayals) and officers (e.g., heroic portrayals).

Digital Media Constructions of Culture, Race, and Media

The vast majority of research detailing the portrayal of people of color in the media relied on the analysis of traditional media sources including television and magazines. However, increasingly, people turn to digital media for both entertainment and news. This section provides an overview of this growing industry that will eventually dominate our media landscape. The discussion first entails video games and Internet news websites. Speculation about the role social media will play with regard to these depictions follows.

Black Depictions in Video Games

An abundance of research focuses on racial representation within video games (Burgess, Dill, Stermer, Burgess, & Brown, 2011 ; Williams, Martins, Consalvo, & Ivory, 2009 ). Similar to traditional entertainment media, African Americans comprise approximately 11% of popular video game characters for major game systems (e.g., Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube) (Williams et al., 2009 ). Conversely, blacks are underrepresented in massive multiplayer online games (MMO) in which players customize their own avatars’ features, including gender and skin tone (Waddell, Ivory, Conde, Long, & McDonnell, 2014 ). In this environment only 3.84% of all unique characters within MMOs are black.

When considering gender differences in portrayals, more problematic depictions exist. For instance, black women are underrepresented in gaming magazines and almost completely absent from video game covers (Burgess et al., 2011 ). Meanwhile, black men are typically portrayed as either athletic and/or violent . Black aggression does not occur in socially sanctioned settings (e.g., war). Instead, many black males appear as outlaws (e.g., street fighters).

Black Depictions in Digital News Sources

There is limited research on news depictions and race within digital media contexts, but this will most likely become the focus of future scholarship over the next few years. This focus will be fueled by the rise of political figures, such as Donald Trump, who utilize media stereotypes to advance their political agendas (Dixon, 2017a ). Much of what we do know stems from research on websites and digital news sources. One earlier study of this phenomena found that African Americans were underrepresented as part of images and headlines used in these web news stories (Josey et al., 2009 ). They were also more strongly associated with poverty than what the actual poverty rates suggest. A more recent analysis of a wide variety of online news sources similarly found that black families were overrepresented as poor and welfare dependent (Dixon, 2017a ). In addition, black fathers were misrepresented as excessively absent from the lives of their children. Finally, African American family members were overrepresented as criminal suspects. These findings complement the traditional news conclusions reached by previous scholars.

Latino Depictions in Video Games

Waddell, Ivory, Conde, Long, and McDonnell ( 2014 ) found that the trend of Latino underrepresentation in media extends to the video game industry. Latino avatars were not observed in the highest grossing MMO games in 2010 (0%). Williams, Martins, Consalvo, and Ivory ( 2009 ) also assessed the racial characteristics of video game characters across 150 games and found that white characters were observed more often (59.32%) than Latino (1.63%) characters. Furthermore, Latino characters were never observed assuming primary roles.

Latino Depictions in Digital News Sources

In terms of digital news sources, the research presents extremely similar findings between Latinos and African Americans. Latinos continue to be largely underrepresented across a variety of roles in web news (Josey et al., 2009 ). They are underrepresented in both headlines and images. They are also likely to be overassociated with poverty (Dixon, 2017a ; Josey et al., 2009 ).

Summary of Digital Constructions of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity

In summary, underrepresentation remains the norm for both African Americans and Latinos in digital media. At the same time, digital news overly associates these groups with poverty . Clearly, as traditional media and its audience migrate to new digital platforms, this area will continue to be researchers’ focus well into the future. One digital platform not mentioned is social media. Many users receive, consume, and share entertainment and news content via social media. This includes music and music fandom content (Epps & Dixon, 2017 ). Social media’s specific and unique characteristics may contribute to media stereotype cultivation and prevent positive intergroup contact (Dixon, 2017c ). Much work needs to be undertaken in the future to explore these possibilities.

Conclusions

This article began with a discussion of the possible impact of mediated stereotypes to contextualize our discussion. Social categorization theory, social identity theory, and priming/cognitive accessibility suggest that the prominent black stereotypes of black laziness , criminality , innate athleticism , jezebel, and poverty would be embraced by heavy media consumers. Similarly, even though Latinos remain underrepresented, the reinforcement of Latino stereotypes like poverty , harlot , criminal , and illegal immigrant would result from regular media consumption. While underrepresented, Latinos receive enough mainstream media attention for scholars to conduct quantitative social research. Asian and Native Americans’ underrepresentation in mainstream media, however, indicates these groups’ general absence.

When educators teach these topics in class, they are often asked: Why? Why does media perpetuate these stereotypes? Consider these two prominent answers. First, media creators suffer from mostly unconscious, and sometimes conscious bias, that scholars believe facilitates an ethnic blame discourse (Dixon & Linz, 2000a ; Romer, Jamieson, & de Coteau, 1998 ; Van Dijk, 1993 ).

This discourse tends to occur within groups (e.g., whites conversing with one another) and leads them to blame social problems on ethnic others (e.g., Latinos and blacks). Given that media producers remain overwhelmingly white, this explanation appears plausible. As white people engage in these discussions, their way of thinking manifests in their content. The second explanation revolves around the structural limitations and economic interests of news agencies (Dixon & Linz, 2000a ). This explanation suggests that media agencies air material most appealing to audiences in the simplest form possible to increase ratings. This process heavily relies on stereotypes because stereotypes make processing and attending to media messages easier for audience members. In turn, profits increase. This points to problems related to the relationship between media content creation and the media industry’s profit motives. Skeptics may question these explanations’ plausibility, but overall, mediated stereotypes remain a persistent part of the media environment. Digital media exacerbate the negative effects of mediated stereotype consumption.

The evolution of the Internet from 1997 to 2021

Interconnection , Networks

How has the Internet changed over the years? The Opte Project, by Barrett Lyon, captures the evolution of the Internet from 1997 to 2021 . As the Internet is a network of networks, Barrett Lyon has leveraged the connections among all those networks to create a map of the Internet.

This visual representation of the Internet is a wonderful educational tool, as it offers a quick vision of the Internet and networking. It has indeed been used in many educational discussions, publications, books, museums, etc. to illustrate how the Internet looks like. The project is truly interesting to picture the immense size of the Internet and its constant evolution. The Internet’s rapid growth is also noticeable in facts such as the depletion of IPv4 or the significant increase in Internet traffic we are experiencing globally.

Video of the evolution of the Internet from 1997 to 2021

The following video by Barrett Lyon “materializes”, in two minutes, how the Internet has evolved during the last decades. It does so by showing how networks are connected among them. As explained by Barrett Lyon’s on the Opte Project ’s website:

“This video takes you through a journey of incredible engineering. Starting from the first routing table captures (provided by the University of Oregon’s RouteViews project) in 1997, we walk through the first Internet’s astonishing growth to 2021.”

Each Regional Internet Register (RIR) has been assigned a color:

Green represents the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Center (RIPE NCC).
Blue represents the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN).
Red represents the Asia-Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC).
Yellow represents the African Network Information Center (AFRINIC).
Pink represents the Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Center (LACNIC).

In addition to those colors, white is used for backbones and brown for the US Military. Besides, on the lower left corner, the name of the dominant networks is updated according to mergers, acquisitions and brand changes. On the project’s website, you can find more details about the Opte project and its raw resources.

Internet users growth from 1997 to 2021

The number of Internet users worldwide has also experienced an astonishing growth over the last decades. From 1997 to 2021, the number of Internet users around the world has increased from 70 million to more than 5,250 million.

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Top browsers: features, comparison and stats (2023)

The Internet: evolution and growth statistics

IPv4 address exhaustion and solutions

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The Internet Map: a visual representation of the relationship between 350,000 websites

The internet map is an impressive visualization of 350,000 websites and how they are linked to each other..

By Justin Rubio

Via Reddit | Source The Internet Map

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Imagine the web as a giant galaxy where the planets are sites clustered together by likeness, and what you might get is something like The Internet Map . Representing over 350,000 websites from 196 countries and all domain zones at the end of 2011, the map displays over 2 million site links based on topical similarities. Each site is represented by a circle, with size depending on the amount of traffic, and the space between each is determined by frequency, or strength, of the link created when user's jump from one website to another. If you want to get into the fine details of how the map's layout is calculated, the group behind the project has provided a few very technical mathematical and engineering resources. Feel free to move around the map while zooming in and out to view smaller sites, but be aware, there is a "vast porno cluster" hiding in there.

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Seeing the internet

Visualisation of the Routing Paths of the Internet

What do you think of when you think about the internet? Do you think about some of the everyday ways in which you might use it: checking email, internet banking, an online supermarket order, ‘skyping’ friends? Or perhaps you think about the 'net' itself, the internet as a global infrastructure, connecting different places?

The image above is one of the most commonly used images of the internet, from The Opte Project. It was generated on 11 July 2015 and visualises connections between computers. The colours denote where the connections are:

Blue: North America Green: Europe Purple: Latin America Red: Asia Pacific Orange: Africa White: the backbone of the internet: the most highly connected networks

The world online

Wherever you are in the world, though, if you have a computer, a tablet at work or at home, a smartphone or a smart TV, then the chances are that you're on the internet a lot. You'll be communicating with friends, family and colleagues using email and/or social media. You might be using the internet to undertake household tasks like shopping or banking or arranging for your central heating to be serviced. You might stream music or a movie, or watch catch-up TV. And of course, if you’re an OU student you'll be using the internet for your studies!

But even in the case of people who don't have any of that technology – who don't own a smartphone or a tablet, and who, in the Global North, are more likely to be poor and old – a lot of what they do will be managed by digital technologies. The bus that runs into town will probably have a sensor on it sending wireless signals to an LED sign on a bus stop saying when it will arrive; traffic lights may be controlled by sensors counting traffic flow; the stock levels in local supermarkets are managed using software; the cash register where shopping is paid for, and the loyalty card that is swiped as part of that transaction, both take data from that sale and send it elsewhere, via the internet. Cities in particular are full of machines gathering digital data about all sorts of things.

We can think of the internet as a way of transmitting all the data that is generated by an activity. Data, according to Rob Kitchin in his book The Data Revolution, "are raw elements that can be abstracted from (given by) phenomena – measured and recorded in various ways. However, in general use, data refer to those elements that are taken: extracted through observations, computations, experiments, and record keeping" (p2). A variety of digital devices now capture lots of different kinds of data – from your supermarket purchases to your health records – and hold it in vast databases, where it can then be put to many uses. Many commentators argue that, while human societies have always created data, digital technologies are now gathering it as a speed and volume that is unprecedented historically.

Some scholars and campaigners, however, are worried that, while we're very familiar with digital screens and do lots of things with them, most of us are much less aware of the data that they gather, who owns that data, where it goes and what gets done with it. They suggest that this is in part because the internet itself – all those connections that send data between computers, the way that data is analysed and used – is invisible. They think the invisibility of the internet is a problem because it makes it harder to understand, or even to think about, what happens to that data.

So how can the internet be pictured - literally?

One approach adopted by some artists in response to this concern is to concentrate on the hardware – the physical supports of the internet – and map the sensors and devices that transmit data, the cables that carry it to servers and the servers where it's stored and processed.

Artist Ingrid Burrington, for example, has produced a guide to the streets of New York that points out all the ways in which the hardware of the internet is evident in an ordinary street. She lists manhole covers, street markings, antennae and buildings that house data centres. Ingrid and Dan Williams did something similar in London in late 2015, for an exhibition of data-based artwork. To Ingrid's list of New York internet infrastructure they added green BT utility cabinets. You can see her work at Seeing Networks and BigBangData

Lots of digital data is also carried wirelessly, and artist/designer, Timo Arnall, developed a project that makes wireless signals visible by turning them into patterns of light. Timo Arnall has also documented a data-centre: that is, the building in which huge servers store data (in this case, the digital communication company, Telefonica).

You can see his work at Elastic Space, where the works Internet Machine and The Immaterials are most relevant for the sort of analysis I am discussing. These are just a couple of examples of artists making the internet visible by visualising its infrastructure.

Making the workers visible

Picturing the technological infrastructure of the internet is an important form of documentation. However it doesn't address the ways in which this infrastructure depends on all sorts of human workers for its construction and maintenance. Other artists have therefore decided to picture the human labour involved in creating the internet's infrastructure, and so too have many campaigning organisations.

Many digital technologies rely on rare metals – tin, copper, titanium, for example – to function. Mining for these metals causes devastating ecological damage, both in the extraction process itself and in how waste from that process is disposed of. Moreover, mining for these minerals in low-income countries is often poorly paid, with little concern for workers' safety and security.

And of course the internet requires all sorts of other labour too: the work of building its hardware (from cables and servers to smartphones and sensors), installing and maintaining that hardware, designing its software (from databases to apps), managing its data flows, not to mention all the things that are done with the internet in everyday code/spaces.

Campaigning organisations concerned about both the human and environmental consequences of this mining have used images to make those costs visible. For example, Friends of the Earth have published this photoessay about the environmental consequences of mining for tin in Indonesia's Bangka islands, or read the journalist David Nield’s introduction to the environmental costs of smartphone production.

Photographs of the people and objects that make up the internet show us some of the spaces and places of the internet's infrastructure: the mines where some of its components begin their lives, and the streets where many of them function. They also show us some of the components of the internet: its infrastructure and its workers.

But the internet is made up of one more thing: its data.

Visualising digital data

Many artists and campaigners have also used the data that flows through the internet's cables and servers as material for their work. Artists have converted digital data into images, sculptures and installations, and 2015 and early 2016 saw several exhibitions in Europe that explored the diversity of this work. Academics have also tracked the patterns that different kinds of data make as they travel through the internet.

The image below is just one example of how the data that travels through the internet has its own geographies. This map looks at the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia; specifically it examines the location of the events, places and people mentioned in Wikipedia articles. What it shows is that most of the events, places and people mentioned are located in Western Europe.

Map showing 'The Geographically Uneven Coverage of Wikipedia' as described in the text

In other work on what places are mentioned in Wikipedia, Mark Graham and his collaborators note that:

“There is a clear and highly uneven geography of information in Wikipedia. Europe and North America are home to 84% of all articles. Anguilla has the fewest number of geotagged articles (four), and indeed most small island nations and city states have less than 100 articles. However, it is not just microstates that are characterized by extremely low levels of wiki representation. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in the encyclopedia. Remarkably, there are more Wikipedia articles (7,800) written about Antarctica than any country in Africa or South America. Even China, which is home to the world’s biggest population of Internet users and is the fourth largest country on Earth contains fewer than 1% of all geotagged articles. Because of the high visibility of Wikipedia in online information ecosystems, countless decisions are made and countless opinions are formed based on information available in the encyclopedia. It is thus important to point out the digital terra incognita that covers much of the world and reproduces existing representational asymmetries.”

So, what do we see when we think about the internet?

I would suggest that, if we try, we can see infrastructure, digital workers and data., and we can see these in very different formats. Here, you've seen art documentary photography, video art, graphic art and maps – and other artists’ work to make software code visible.

But the most important thing that many of these images show, are the inequalities embedded at the heart of the internet. In both its physical infrastructure, the kind of labour it relies on, and the data it generates, the internet has a highly differentiated geography.

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Originally published: Thursday, 18 May 2017
Body text - Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 : The Open University
Image 'Visualisation of the Routing Paths of the Internet' - Barrett Lyon / The Opte Project under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license
Image 'The World Online map as described in the text' - Ralph Strauman, Mark Graham, geonet.oii.ox.ac.uk, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license
Image 'Map showing 'The Geographically Uneven Coverage of Wikipedia' as described in the text' - Ralph Strauman, Mark Graham, geonet.oii.ox.ac.uk, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license
Image 'The Legacy of Nuclear Power: Part 1' - cyocum under CC-BY licence under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license
Image 'The Secret Geographies of Finance' - Nick Youngson under CC-BY licence under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license
Image '‘Citizen sensing’ and new forms of environmental monitoring' - Riffle under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license
Image 'Seeing the internet' - Barrett Lyon / The Opte Project under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license
Image 'Geography Matters: A Collection' - Copyright: Artwork by Catherine Pain © The Open University
Image 'Protecting Landscapes and Creating the Right Tools for the Job' - duncan c under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license

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How Social Media Shapes Our Identity

By Nausicaa Renner

An adult peering through a large mobile device at a baby.

Last year, I had a strange dream. My father and I were wading in an industrial canal, reminiscent of a subway, as thousands of hatchery-raised fish were being released into it. The fish crowded, slimy, around our legs, and I knew (in the way that one knows in a dream) that they thought, as they hit the water, that they were drowning—that they had to experience death before entering adulthood. The next day, I told my father about the dream. He revealed that, when I was three, when we were living in Pittsburgh, he took me to see a truckful of catfish being pumped into an artificial pond. I was too young to remember this. But somewhere in my mind the vision of fish being spewed into water had lodged itself, resurfacing more than twenty-five years later.

These days, it’s common to find an image emerging, unbeckoned, from the reservoir of the past. We spend hours wading through streams of photos, many of which document, in unprecedented ways, our daily lives. Facebook was invented in 2004. By 2015, Kate Eichhorn writes in “ The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media ,” people were sharing thirty million images an hour on Snapchat, and British parents “posted, on average, nearly two hundred photographs of their child online each year.” For those who have grown up with social media—a group that includes pretty much everyone under twenty-five—childhood, an era that was fruitfully mysterious for the rest of us, is surprisingly accessible. According to Eichhorn, a media historian at the New School, this is certain to have some kind of profound effect on the development of identity. What that effect will be we’re not quite sure.

Eichhorn sees both sides of the coin. On the one hand, she says, children and teen-agers have gained a level of control that they didn’t have before. In the past, adults refused to acknowledge children’s agency, or imposed on them an idealized notion of innocence and purity. Adults were the ones writing books, taking photos with expensive cameras, and commissioning paintings, all of which tended to commemorate childhood—to look back at it—rather than participate in it. The arrival of cheaply made instant photos, in the nineteen-sixties, allowed children to seize a means of production, and the arrival of the Internet gave them an unprecedented degree of self-determination. “If childhood was once constructed and recorded by adults and mirrored back to children (e.g., in a carefully curated family photo album or a series of home video clips), this is no longer the case,” Eichhorn writes. “Today, young people create images and put them into circulation without the interference of adults.”

This practice can be hugely beneficial. New technology—especially the smartphone—allows us to produce a narrative of our lives, to choose what to remember and what to contribute to our own mythos. For Eichhorn, this is the latest instance of a long-held, if mysterious, practice. “Long before children were able to create, edit, and curate images of their lives,” she writes, “they were already doing so on a psychic level.” Freud called these images “screen memories”—no pun intended—and he thought that we used them to soften or obscure painful experiences. Humans have always tried to cope with the difficulty of memory, to turn it “from an intolerable horror to something which is reassuringly innocuous and familiar.” Social media just makes us more adept at it.

On the other hand, Eichhorn writes, such media can prevent those who wish to break with their past from doing so cleanly. We’re not the only ones posting; our friends and family chronicle our lives, usually without our consent. Growing up online, Eichhorn worries, might impede our ability to edit memories, cull what needs to be culled, and move on. “The potential danger is no longer childhood’s disappearance, but rather the possibility of a perpetual childhood,” she writes. We may, in short, have traded “screen memories for screens.”

This is of particular import for those who yearn to establish new identities. People who transition, for instance, often rely on having a clean break, visually, with their previous appearances; as Eichhorn points out, one of the early promises of the Internet, when it was just “texts and clip art,” was that it “presented itself as a safe place [for transgender youth] to try on an aspect of their identities they could not explore in their material lives.” Now that the Internet is more permanent, and more pervasive, it’s hard to avoid the relics of past identities. Eichhorn cites one of her students, Kevin, an aspiring film critic from a small town in upstate New York. By his second year of college, Kevin says, his Facebook stream “was getting really weird. I had my new friends from New York posting about queer performance art and these guys from my high school posting about dirt biking in a gravel pit and tagging me in photographs from high school. I needed to move on.” Although he deactivated his social-media accounts and created new ones under a pseudonym, he continued to be tagged in old photos. “I guess that Kevin is out there for good,” he says. “I just have to live with him and all those people he was trying to escape.”

The persistence of certain images is more of a problem for some than for others. There are moments, elevated not by the fact of being recorded but by the impossibility of being erased, that become traumatic. These situations—in which a naked photo or an offensive tweet destroys a person’s public life—are unfortunate, and widely covered (for example, in Jon Ronson’s “ So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed ”). Eichhorn details the case of Ghyslain Raza, a Canadian teen-ager who, in 2002, recorded himself wielding a golf-ball retriever as though it were a lightsabre. The video, which was found by a classmate, titled “Star Wars Kid,” and uploaded to the Internet, was viewed by millions of people; as Eichhorn points out, this all happened at a time when virality, as a phenomenon, wasn’t really a thing. Raza was bullied at school and ended up in a psychiatric ward. In 2013, still unable to escape the video, despite legal action, he spoke publicly about his experience, describing his contemplation of suicide.

Everyone, Eichhorn writes, benefits from experimentation in adolescence. During that time, we exist in what the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called a psychosocial “moratorium”—a stage in which we hover “between the morality learned by the child and the ethics to be developed by the adult.” The moratorium is a period of trial and error that society allows adolescents, who are permitted to take risks without fear of consequence, in hopes that doing so will clarify a “core self—a personal sense of what gives life meaning.” The Internet interrupts the privacy of this era; it tends to scale up mistakes to monumental proportions, and to put them on our permanent records. Colleges and employers now look at social-media accounts for evidence of character. Eichhorn spends less time than she might have on how this affects today’s teens. What is it like to live under threat? What are the ramifications when an entire generation never gets the chance to experiment freely or to remake themselves?

Eichhorn does lightly gesture to a kind of universal human right, one that runs counter to the whims of companies that use data. “Forgetting—that once taken-for-granted built-in resource that all humans possessed—is now being pitted against the interests of technology companies,” she writes, implying, with an endearing idealism, that we have a right to forget. (For some, this belief might reflect a distinctly American approach to the rest of the world.) More plausibly, she cites the right to be forgotten , which is the nickname of both data privacy regulations in Europe and movements against naming minors in the media. Either way, the implication is that the ability to detach from one’s past self—to move laterally, as an individual, into a new body or personality—is a democratic ideal. We also have the right to stay as we are. In some cases, retaining our sense of self across chasms that might destroy it is more important than having a rebellious phase. Take, for instance, the case of migrants, which Eichhorn touches on briefly: “Family members left behind can now stay in constant touch with their sons and daughters and even track their footsteps across Europe.” Here, memory is almost a form of political representation, enabled by social media; groups are able to preserve their history as they travel across continents.

Are all photos documentary? In “ The Social Photo ,” Nathan Jurgenson puts forth the useful proposition that most online photos are about sharing experiences, not creating memories. In one passage, Jurgenson, a founder of Real Life magazine, writes that selfies are “less an accurate picture of me at this time in this place and more . . . a visual depiction of the idea of me.” They’re units of communication, more emojis or hieroglyphics than portraits; they have little context, aren’t discernibly located anywhere, and typically come in the aggregate. For the most part, it wouldn’t really matter if they existed in twenty years. This explains the prevalence of disappearing photos, like Instagram stories and Snapchat. (Jurgenson is also a sociologist for Snap Inc., Snapchat’s parent company.) It also explains photos of food, which are rarely artful or worth saving.

For Jurgenson, taking social photos changes the way vision works—a process that began with the advent of cameras and is still evolving today. Teen-agers are cyborgs, and their phones are mechanical eyes that help them interpret their experience. “To document,” Jurgenson writes, “is to be involved with our own experience instead of passively letting it float by.” On this subject, Jurgenson has all the right, if somewhat dutiful, opinions: nostalgia is overrated, but he’s not into “digital austerity.” We shouldn’t hark back to an era in which we were less attached to technology—mostly because that era doesn’t exist. “Our reality has always been already mediated, augmented, documented,” he writes, “and there’s no access to some state of unmediated purity.” We shouldn’t ask whether social photography is good, but how it can be good.

Jurgenson, unlike Eichhorn, isn’t worried about the Internet making it hard to bury past versions of ourselves. If anything, he fears the prevalence of death. Photos, he writes, “embalm” their subjects, encasing them in a “stilling sadness that kills what it attempts to save out of a fear of losing it.” For him, the risk of constant documentation is alienation: a sense that our bodies are generating still moments rather than constant movement. He cites Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a German scholar who wrote about the effect of the railway on human perception. With its speed and glass windows, “the train flattens nature into something smooth and predictable, not something traveled within but something easily seen and consumed,” Jurgenson writes. “As more of life is experienced through camera screens, does it occur at a similar remove, where the messiness of lived experience is made into something merely observable?”

It would, indeed, be stunning if we were able to see painful moments from the past—the ones we meditate on for years—as dead and embalmed. The trouble is, most difficult memories aren’t captured by photos, videos, or tweets. Screens, like screen memories, are avoidant; they turn away from the painful. There are few crying children on Instagram. A friend, whose mother digitized all her family’s old home videos, recently told me about a significant birthday party at the roller rink. What she remembered was the drama beforehand: at the time, she was obsessed with Rollerblades, and when the rink had only roller skates her mother rushed to a sports store to get an inline pair, barely saving the day. None of this, it turned out, was captured in the video. All it showed was the triumph—a redemptive moment after tears, and a happy loop around the rink.

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By Cal Newport

By Jonathan Zittrain

By Leslie Jamison

How the Internet Shapes Who We Are

International internet day is a reminder of internet's major influence on us..

Posted October 29, 2021 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods

The use and design of the internet influence how we think about ourselves.
Social media splinter our self-representations and experiences.
Algorithms propel highly individualized experiences.
The Pinwheel Self theory captures the current identity.

The 29th of October marks International Internet Day, a reminder of the world wide web’s exponential influence on who we have become. One thing we ought to think about: we all need to make our minds up about who we want to be online.

With an enormous accumulation of personal data, the internet has become a seductive experience. It is human nature to crave the experience of premium customers who get offers tailored "just for you." So, we willingly and progressively teach the algorithms who we are. Online chat rooms seduce us to communicate with automated replies sent by bots, precisely personalized to us. Our love lives are being revived with artificial intimacies, such as private messaging on Tinder or OnlyFans and our work lives with LinkedIn and Twitter.

Given that the bots are trained with information directly supplied by us from multiple locations and contexts, they often catch us surprised with how much they know about us—sometimes it seems more than our friends or spouses. As the internet becomes more like ‘us’, what does it hold for the future of selfhood?

From the identity perspective, it does not matter which technologies we use in the future. Nor does it matter whether the governance structure of the internet lies in the hands of national governments, autocrats, or technology giants. What matters is the extent to which the algorithms imitate the workings of a human mind. Not as well as a direct causal influence, but if we look more closely, the internet’s evolution neatly maps on the evolution of human identity.

When in 1983 two computer networks exchanged information with each other, it was just like two humans exchanging a smile across the street. Global network operators started with the same principle as communication between two human minds. The Relational Self Theory describes identity as a negotiation of relationships between the Self and the ‘other’. The Self is not autonomous but bound in relationships with other minds and material objects, such as a personal computer.

With Windows 95 (the first operating system packaged with a web browser, Internet Explorer), the internet entered our homes. Our relationship with the world wide web got personal. Quadratic machines began sending information to and from our bedrooms. The internet inveigled itself into our daily activities, holidays, and family get-togethers. Our professional and private identities have blurred; our memory capacity and conversations have expanded with online capabilities.

According to the Extended Self theory , individuals can extend their identities into material things they buy and objects they own. The early internet prompted identity extensions not only into objects such as computers or smartphones but also into the activities supported by these technologies, such as e-reading or website browsing. These activities soon turned into habits and ways of being. The Expanded Self theory got revised as the Unbound Self theory. Soon after, a new identity theory got conceived: The Networked Self Theory.

It was only after watching the Pinwheel firework at Mqabba square that I realized the power of the Pinwheel metaphor. A Pinwheel firework perfectly captures our current online behaviours. Unlike other types of fireworks, the Pinwheel rotates around its own center. Its colourful glitters are individualized.

Each data point—a photo, a text message, or a Snap—is a glitter for the algorithms to spin. The wheel gives rise to short intense experiences, and, occasionally, its flames reach spectacular heights.

Facebook, Twitter or Instagram host multiple rotating identities, just like the Maltese towns that host the Pinwheel Fireworks. Different squares please different market segments and so do our self-representations on different social media platforms. We pick and choose a different identity for a different audience—we share updates on work meetings on Microsoft Teams, and dinner plates on Instagram. The more time we invest in sharing different parts of ourselves on different platforms online, the more the algorithms splinter our understanding of who we are.

Back at the Maltese square, I watch how the wheel rotates and creates spectacular sparks around its own flaming core. When the sparks burn off, the wheel disappears in the black sky. I take a quick snap and upload it to my Instagram story. The story goes viral but disappears after 24 hours. Instagram stories and other ephemeral media are about quick gratification. Their popularity and short presence reflect the current identity crisis we experience; collectively as nations, and individually as parents and children. They signal that the Pinwheel Self is in transition to a different type of identity.

The new identity will not be about individual rotating wheels. The future internet will be a drone light show, reflecting fluid and unique identities moving and changing in a colossal spectacle. Identity formation won’t be an incidental detail but an integral part of the show. You won’t be able to write yourself out of it, we all will be the spectators and participants in the show of shows. When, exactly, the transition will occur is uncertain but one thing is clear: we form the internet, and the internet forms us. It is time to embrace our joint future.

An abbreviated version of this article was originally published in Stavanger Aftenblad, Norway

Natalia Kucirkova, Ph.D. , is Professor at the University of Stavanger, Norway and The Open University, UK.

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The wonderful world of fungi, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, simultaneous translation technology – ever closer to reality, featured author, latest book, the impact of the internet on society: a global perspective, introduction.

The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the vector of technological transformation of the Industrial Age. This global network of computer networks, largely based nowadays on platforms of wireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time, transcending space. The Internet is not really a new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969 (Abbate 1999). But it was in the 1990s when it was privatized and released from the control of the U.S. Department of Commerce that it diffused around the world at extraordinary speed: in 1996 the first survey of Internet users counted about 40 million; in 2013 they are over 2.5 billion, with China accounting for the largest number of Internet users. Furthermore, for some time the spread of the Internet was limited by the difficulty to lay out land-based telecommunications infrastructure in the emerging countries. This has changed with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, in 1991, there were about 16 million subscribers of wireless devices in the world, in 2013 they are close to 7 billion (in a planet of 7.7 billion human beings). Counting on the family and village uses of mobile phones, and taking into consideration the limited use of these devices among children under five years of age, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in the bandwidth as well as in the efficiency and price of the service.

At the heart of these communication networks the Internet ensures the production, distribution, and use of digitized information in all formats. According to the study published by Martin Hilbert in Science (Hilbert and López 2011), 95 percent of all information existing in the planet is digitized and most of it is accessible on the Internet and other computer networks.

The speed and scope of the transformation of our communication environment by Internet and wireless communication has triggered all kind of utopian and dystopian perceptions around the world.

As in all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.

The media aggravate the distorted perception by dwelling into scary reports on the basis of anecdotal observation and biased commentary. If there is a topic in which social sciences, in their diversity, should contribute to the full understanding of the world in which we live, it is precisely the area that has come to be named in academia as Internet Studies. Because, in fact, academic research knows a great deal on the interaction between Internet and society, on the basis of methodologically rigorous empirical research conducted in a plurality of cultural and institutional contexts. Any process of major technological change generates its own mythology. In part because it comes into practice before scientists can assess its effects and implications, so there is always a gap between social change and its understanding. For instance, media often report that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of alienation, isolation, depression, and withdrawal from society. In fact, available evidence shows that there is either no relationship or a positive cumulative relationship between the Internet use and the intensity of sociability. We observe that, overall, the more sociable people are, the more they use the Internet. And the more they use the Internet, the more they increase their sociability online and offline, their civic engagement, and the intensity of family and friendship relationships, in all cultures—with the exception of a couple of early studies of the Internet in the 1990s, corrected by their authors later (Castells 2001; Castells et al. 2007; Rainie and Wellman 2012; Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.).

Thus, the purpose of this chapter will be to summarize some of the key research findings on the social effects of the Internet relying on the evidence provided by some of the major institutions specialized in the social study of the Internet. More specifically, I will be using the data from the world at large: the World Internet Survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future, University of Southern California; the reports of the British Computer Society (BCS), using data from the World Values Survey of the University of Michigan; the Nielsen reports for a variety of countries; and the annual reports from the International Telecommunications Union. For data on the United States, I have used the Pew American Life and Internet Project of the Pew Institute. For the United Kingdom, the Oxford Internet Survey from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, as well as the Virtual Society Project from the Economic and Social Science Research Council. For Spain, the Project Internet Catalonia of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC); the various reports on the information society from Telefónica; and from the Orange Foundation. For Portugal, the Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC) in Lisbon. I would like to emphasize that most of the data in these reports converge toward similar trends. Thus I have selected for my analysis the findings that complement and reinforce each other, offering a consistent picture of the human experience on the Internet in spite of the human diversity.

Given the aim of this publication to reach a broad audience, I will not present in this text the data supporting the analysis presented here. Instead, I am referring the interested reader to the web sources of the research organizations mentioned above, as well as to selected bibliographic references discussing the empirical foundation of the social trends reported here.

Technologies of Freedom, the Network Society, and the Culture of Autonomy

In order to fully understand the effects of the Internet on society, we should remember that technology is material culture. It is produced in a social process in a given institutional environment on the basis of the ideas, values, interests, and knowledge of their producers, both their early producers and their subsequent producers. In this process we must include the users of the technology, who appropriate and adapt the technology rather than adopting it, and by so doing they modify it and produce it in an endless process of interaction between technological production and social use. So, to assess the relevance of Internet in society we must recall the specific characteristics of Internet as a technology. Then we must place it in the context of the transformation of the overall social structure, as well as in relationship to the culture characteristic of this social structure. Indeed, we live in a new social structure, the global network society, characterized by the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy.

Internet is a technology of freedom, in the terms coined by Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1973, coming from a libertarian culture, paradoxically financed by the Pentagon for the benefit of scientists, engineers, and their students, with no direct military application in mind (Castells 2001). The expansion of the Internet from the mid-1990s onward resulted from the combination of three main factors:

The technological discovery of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and his willingness to distribute the source code to improve it by the open-source contribution of a global community of users, in continuity with the openness of the TCP/IP Internet protocols. The web keeps running under the same principle of open source. And two-thirds of web servers are operated by Apache, an open-source server program.
Institutional change in the management of the Internet, keeping it under the loose management of the global Internet community, privatizing it, and allowing both commercial uses and cooperative uses.
Major changes in social structure, culture, and social behavior: networking as a prevalent organizational form; individuation as the main orientation of social behavior; and the culture of autonomy as the culture of the network society.

I will elaborate on these major trends.

Our society is a network society; that is, a society constructed around personal and organizational networks powered by digital networks and communicated by the Internet. And because networks are global and know no boundaries, the network society is a global network society. This historically specific social structure resulted from the interaction between the emerging technological paradigm based on the digital revolution and some major sociocultural changes. A primary dimension of these changes is what has been labeled the rise of the Me-centered society, or, in sociological terms, the process of individuation, the decline of community understood in terms of space, work, family, and ascription in general. This is not the end of community, and not the end of place-based interaction, but there is a shift toward the reconstruction of social relationships, including strong cultural and personal ties that could be considered a form of community, on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects.

The process of individuation is not just a matter of cultural evolution, it is materially produced by the new forms of organizing economic activities, and social and political life, as I analyzed in my trilogy on the Information Age (Castells 1996–2003). It is based on the transformation of space (metropolitan life), work and economic activity (rise of the networked enterprise and networked work processes), culture and communication (shift from mass communication based on mass media to mass self-communication based on the Internet); on the crisis of the patriarchal family, with increasing autonomy of its individual members; the substitution of media politics for mass party politics; and globalization as the selective networking of places and processes throughout the planet.

But individuation does not mean isolation, or even less the end of community. Sociability is reconstructed as networked individualism and community through a quest for like-minded individuals in a process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace and the local space. Individuation is the key process in constituting subjects (individual or collective), networking is the organizational form constructed by these subjects; this is the network society, and the form of sociability is what Rainie and Wellman (2012) conceptualized as networked individualism. Network technologies are of course the medium for this new social structure and this new culture (Papacharissi 2010).

As stated above, academic research has established that the Internet does not isolate people, nor does it reduce their sociability; it actually increases sociability, as shown by myself in my studies in Catalonia (Castells 2007), Rainie and Wellman in the United States (2012), Cardoso in Portugal (2010), and the World Internet Survey for the world at large (Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.). Furthermore, a major study by Michael Willmott for the British Computer Society (Trajectory Partnership 2010) has shown a positive correlation, for individuals and for countries, between the frequency and intensity of the use of the Internet and the psychological indicators of personal happiness. He used global data for 35,000 people obtained from the World Wide Survey of the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2007. Controlling for other factors, the study showed that Internet use empowers people by increasing their feelings of security, personal freedom, and influence, all feelings that have a positive effect on happiness and personal well-being. The effect is particularly positive for people with lower income and who are less qualified, for people in the developing world, and for women. Age does not affect the positive relationship; it is significant for all ages. Why women? Because they are at the center of the network of their families, Internet helps them to organize their lives. Also, it helps them to overcome their isolation, particularly in patriarchal societies. The Internet also contributes to the rise of the culture of autonomy.

The key for the process of individuation is the construction of autonomy by social actors, who become subjects in the process. They do so by defining their specific projects in interaction with, but not submission to, the institutions of society. This is the case for a minority of individuals, but because of their capacity to lead and mobilize they introduce a new culture in every domain of social life: in work (entrepreneurship), in the media (the active audience), in the Internet (the creative user), in the market (the informed and proactive consumer), in education (students as informed critical thinkers, making possible the new frontier of e-learning and m-learning pedagogy), in health (the patient-centered health management system) in e-government (the informed, participatory citizen), in social movements (cultural change from the grassroots, as in feminism or environmentalism), and in politics (the independent-minded citizen able to participate in self-generated political networks).

There is increasing evidence of the direct relationship between the Internet and the rise of social autonomy. From 2002 to 2007 I directed in Catalonia one of the largest studies ever conducted in Europe on the Internet and society, based on 55,000 interviews, one-third of them face to face (IN3 2002–07). As part of this study, my collaborators and I compared the behavior of Internet users to non-Internet users in a sample of 3,000 people, representative of the population of Catalonia. Because in 2003 only about 40 percent of people were Internet users we could really compare the differences in social behavior for users and non-users, something that nowadays would be more difficult given the 79 percent penetration rate of the Internet in Catalonia. Although the data are relatively old, the findings are not, as more recent studies in other countries (particularly in Portugal) appear to confirm the observed trends. We constructed scales of autonomy in different dimensions. Only between 10 and 20 percent of the population, depending on dimensions, were in the high level of autonomy. But we focused on this active segment of the population to explore the role of the Internet in the construction of autonomy. Using factor analysis we identified six major types of autonomy based on projects of individuals according to their practices:

a) professional development b) communicative autonomy c) entrepreneurship d) autonomy of the body e) sociopolitical participation f) personal, individual autonomy

These six types of autonomous practices were statistically independent among themselves. But each one of them correlated positively with Internet use in statistically significant terms, in a self-reinforcing loop (time sequence): the more one person was autonomous, the more she/he used the web, and the more she/he used the web, the more autonomous she/he became (Castells et al. 2007). This is a major empirical finding. Because if the dominant cultural trend in our society is the search for autonomy, and if the Internet powers this search, then we are moving toward a society of assertive individuals and cultural freedom, regardless of the barriers of rigid social organizations inherited from the Industrial Age. From this Internet-based culture of autonomy have emerged a new kind of sociability, networked sociability, and a new kind of sociopolitical practice, networked social movements and networked democracy. I will now turn to the analysis of these two fundamental trends at the source of current processes of social change worldwide.

The Rise of Social Network Sites on the Internet

Since 2002 (creation of Friendster, prior to Facebook) a new socio-technical revolution has taken place on the Internet: the rise of social network sites where now all human activities are present, from personal interaction to business, to work, to culture, to communication, to social movements, and to politics.

Social Network Sites are web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

(Boyd and Ellison 2007, 2)

Social networking uses, in time globally spent, surpassed e-mail in November 2007. It surpassed e-mail in number of users in July 2009. In terms of users it reached 1 billion by September 2010, with Facebook accounting for about half of it. In 2013 it has almost doubled, particularly because of increasing use in China, India, and Latin America. There is indeed a great diversity of social networking sites (SNS) by countries and cultures. Facebook, started for Harvard-only members in 2004, is present in most of the world, but QQ, Cyworld, and Baidu dominate in China; Orkut in Brazil; Mixi in Japan; etc. In terms of demographics, age is the main differential factor in the use of SNS, with a drop of frequency of use after 50 years of age, and particularly 65. But this is not just a teenager’s activity. The main Facebook U.S. category is in the age group 35–44, whose frequency of use of the site is higher than for younger people. Nearly 60 percent of adults in the U.S. have at least one SNS profile, 30 percent two, and 15 percent three or more. Females are as present as males, except when in a society there is a general gender gap. We observe no differences in education and class, but there is some class specialization of SNS, such as Myspace being lower than FB; LinkedIn is for professionals.

Thus, the most important activity on the Internet at this point in time goes through social networking, and SNS have become the chosen platforms for all kind of activities, not just personal friendships or chatting, but for marketing, e-commerce, education, cultural creativity, media and entertainment distribution, health applications, and sociopolitical activism. This is a significant trend for society at large. Let me explore the meaning of this trend on the basis of the still scant evidence.

Social networking sites are constructed by users themselves building on specific criteria of grouping. There is entrepreneurship in the process of creating sites, then people choose according to their interests and projects. Networks are tailored by people themselves with different levels of profiling and privacy. The key to success is not anonymity, but on the contrary, self-presentation of a real person connecting to real people (in some cases people are excluded from the SNS when they fake their identity). So, it is a self-constructed society by networking connecting to other networks. But this is not a virtual society. There is a close connection between virtual networks and networks in life at large. This is a hybrid world, a real world, not a virtual world or a segregated world.

People build networks to be with others, and to be with others they want to be with on the basis of criteria that include those people who they already know (a selected sub-segment). Most users go on the site every day. It is permanent connectivity. If we needed an answer to what happened to sociability in the Internet world, here it is:

There is a dramatic increase in sociability, but a different kind of sociability, facilitated and dynamized by permanent connectivity and social networking on the web.

Based on the time when Facebook was still releasing data (this time is now gone) we know that in 2009 users spent 500 billion minutes per month. This is not just about friendship or interpersonal communication. People do things together, share, act, exactly as in society, although the personal dimension is always there. Thus, in the U.S. 38 percent of adults share content, 21 percent remix, 14 percent blog, and this is growing exponentially, with development of technology, software, and SNS entrepreneurial initiatives. On Facebook, in 2009 the average user was connected to 60 pages, groups, and events, people interacted per month to 160 million objects (pages, groups, events), the average user created 70 pieces of content per month, and there were 25 billion pieces of content shared per month (web links, news stories, blogs posts, notes, photos). SNS are living spaces connecting all dimensions of people’s experience. This transforms culture because people share experience with a low emotional cost, while saving energy and effort. They transcend time and space, yet they produce content, set up links, and connect practices. It is a constantly networked world in every dimension of human experience. They co-evolve in permanent, multiple interaction. But they choose the terms of their co-evolution.

Thus, people live their physical lives but increasingly connect on multiple dimensions in SNS.

Paradoxically, the virtual life is more social than the physical life, now individualized by the organization of work and urban living.

But people do not live a virtual reality, indeed it is a real virtuality, since social practices, sharing, mixing, and living in society is facilitated in the virtuality, in what I called time ago the “space of flows” (Castells 1996).

Because people are increasingly at ease in the multi-textuality and multidimensionality of the web, marketers, work organizations, service agencies, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the Internet, less and less setting up alternative sites, more and more being present in the networks that people construct by themselves and for themselves, with the help of Internet social networking entrepreneurs, some of whom become billionaires in the process, actually selling freedom and the possibility of the autonomous construction of lives. This is the liberating potential of the Internet made material practice by these social networking sites. The largest of these social networking sites are usually bounded social spaces managed by a company. However, if the company tries to impede free communication it may lose many of its users, because the entry barriers in this industry are very low. A couple of technologically savvy youngsters with little capital can set up a site on the Internet and attract escapees from a more restricted Internet space, as happened to AOL and other networking sites of the first generation, and as could happen to Facebook or any other SNS if they are tempted to tinker with the rules of openness (Facebook tried to make users pay and retracted within days). So, SNS are often a business, but they are in the business of selling freedom, free expression, chosen sociability. When they tinker with this promise they risk their hollowing by net citizens migrating with their friends to more friendly virtual lands.

Perhaps the most telling expression of this new freedom is the transformation of sociopolitical practices on the Internet.

Communication Power: Mass-Self Communication and the Transformation of Politics

Power and counterpower, the foundational relationships of society, are constructed in the human mind, through the construction of meaning and the processing of information according to certain sets of values and interests (Castells 2009).

Ideological apparatuses and the mass media have been key tools of mediating communication and asserting power, and still are. But the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy, has found in Internet and mobile communication networks a major medium of mass self-communication and self-organization.

The key source for the social production of meaning is the process of socialized communication. I define communication as the process of sharing meaning through the exchange of information. Socialized communication is the one that exists in the public realm, that has the potential of reaching society at large. Therefore, the battle over the human mind is largely played out in the process of socialized communication. And this is particularly so in the network society, the social structure of the Information Age, which is characterized by the pervasiveness of communication networks in a multimodal hypertext.

The ongoing transformation of communication technology in the digital age extends the reach of communication media to all domains of social life in a network that is at the same time global and local, generic and customized, in an ever-changing pattern.

As a result, power relations, that is the relations that constitute the foundation of all societies, as well as the processes challenging institutionalized power relations, are increasingly shaped and decided in the communication field. Meaningful, conscious communication is what makes humans human. Thus, any major transformation in the technology and organization of communication is of utmost relevance for social change. Over the last four decades the advent of the Internet and of wireless communication has shifted the communication process in society at large from mass communication to mass self-communication. This is from a message sent from one to many with little interactivity to a system based on messages from many to many, multimodal, in chosen time, and with interactivity, so that senders are receivers and receivers are senders. And both have access to a multimodal hypertext in the web that constitutes the endlessly changing backbone of communication processes.

The transformation of communication from mass communication to mass self-communication has contributed decisively to alter the process of social change. As power relationships have always been based on the control of communication and information that feed the neural networks constitutive of the human mind, the rise of horizontal networks of communication has created a new landscape of social and political change by the process of disintermediation of the government and corporate controls over communication. This is the power of the network, as social actors build their own networks on the basis of their projects, values, and interests. The outcome of these processes is open ended and dependent on specific contexts. Freedom, in this case freedom of communicate, does not say anything on the uses of freedom in society. This is to be established by scholarly research. But we need to start from this major historical phenomenon: the building of a global communication network based on the Internet, a technology that embodies the culture of freedom that was at its source.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century there have been multiple social movements around the world that have used the Internet as their space of formation and permanent connectivity, among the movements and with society at large. These networked social movements, formed in the social networking sites on the Internet, have mobilized in the urban space and in the institutional space, inducing new forms of social movements that are the main actors of social change in the network society. Networked social movements have been particularly active since 2010, and especially in the Arab revolutions against dictatorships; in Europe and the U.S. as forms of protest against the management of the financial crisis; in Brazil; in Turkey; in Mexico; and in highly diverse institutional contexts and economic conditions. It is precisely the similarity of the movements in extremely different contexts that allows the formulation of the hypothesis that this is the pattern of social movements characteristic of the global network society. In all cases we observe the capacity of these movements for self-organization, without a central leadership, on the basis of a spontaneous emotional movement. In all cases there is a connection between Internet-based communication, mobile networks, and the mass media in different forms, feeding into each other and amplifying the movement locally and globally.

These movements take place in the context of exploitation and oppression, social tensions and social struggles; but struggles that were not able to successfully challenge the state in other instances of revolt are now powered by the tools of mass self-communication. It is not the technology that induces the movements, but without the technology (Internet and wireless communication) social movements would not take the present form of being a challenge to state power. The fact is that technology is material culture (ideas brought into the design) and the Internet materialized the culture of freedom that, as it has been documented, emerged on American campuses in the 1960s. This culture-made technology is at the source of the new wave of social movements that exemplify the depth of the global impact of the Internet in all spheres of social organization, affecting particularly power relationships, the foundation of the institutions of society. (See case studies and an analytical perspective on the interaction between Internet and networked social movements in Castells 2012.)

The Internet, as all technologies, does not produce effects by itself. Yet, it has specific effects in altering the capacity of the communication system to be organized around flows that are interactive, multimodal, asynchronous or synchronous, global or local, and from many to many, from people to people, from people to objects, and from objects to objects, increasingly relying on the semantic web. How these characteristics affect specific systems of social relationships has to be established by research, and this is what I tried to present in this text. What is clear is that without the Internet we would not have seen the large-scale development of networking as the fundamental mechanism of social structuring and social change in every domain of social life. The Internet, the World Wide Web, and a variety of networks increasingly based on wireless platforms constitute the technological infrastructure of the network society, as the electrical grid and the electrical engine were the support system for the form of social organization that we conceptualized as the industrial society. Thus, as a social construction, this technological system is open ended, as the network society is an open-ended form of social organization that conveys the best and the worse in humankind. Yet, the global network society is our society, and the understanding of its logic on the basis of the interaction between culture, organization, and technology in the formation and development of social and technological networks is a key field of research in the twenty-first century.

We can only make progress in our understanding through the cumulative effort of scholarly research. Only then we will be able to cut through the myths surrounding the key technology of our time. A digital communication technology that is already a second skin for young people, yet it continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand.

These references are in fact sources of more detailed references specific to each one of the topics analyzed in this text.

Abbate, Janet. A Social History of the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007).

Cardoso, Gustavo, Angus Cheong, and Jeffrey Cole (eds). World Wide Internet: Changing Societies, Economies and Cultures. Macau: University of Macau Press, 2009.

Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–2003.

———. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

———. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

———. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

Castells, Manuel, Imma Tubella, Teresa Sancho, and Meritxell Roca.

La transición a la sociedad red. Barcelona: Ariel, 2007.

Hilbert, Martin, and Priscilla López. “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information.” Science 332, no. 6025 (April 1, 2011): pp. 60–65.

Papacharissi, Zizi, ed. The Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Networking Sites. Routledge, 2010.

Rainie. Lee, and Barry Wellman. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Trajectory Partnership (Michael Willmott and Paul Flatters). The Information Dividend: Why IT Makes You “Happier.” Swindon: British Informatics Society Limited, 2010. http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/info-dividend-full-report.pdf

Selected Web References. Used as sources for analysis in the chapter

Agência para a Sociedade do Conhecimento. “Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC).” http://www.umic.pt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3026&Itemid=167

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. “Features, Press and Policy.” http://www.bcs.org/category/7307

Center for the Digital Future. The World Internet Project International Report. 4th ed. Los Angeles: USC Annenberg School, Center for the Digital Future, 2012. http://www.worldinternetproject.net/_files/_Published/_oldis/770_2012wip_report4th_ed.pdf

ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council). “Papers and Reports.” Virtual Society. http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk/reports.htm

Fundación Orange. “Análisis y Prospectiva: Informe eEspaña.” Fundación Orange. http://fundacionorange.es/fundacionorange/analisisprospectiva.html

Fundación Telefónica. “Informes SI.” Fundación Telefónica. http://sociedadinformacion.fundacion.telefonica.com/DYC/SHI/InformesSI/seccion=1190&idioma=es_ES.do

IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute). UOC. “Project Internet Catalonia (PIC): An Overview.” Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, 2002–07. http://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic/eng/

International Telecommunication Union. “Annual Reports.” http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/sfo/annual_reports/index.html

Nielsen Company. “Reports.” 2013. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/reports/2013.html?tag=Category:Media+ and+Entertainment

Oxford Internet Surveys. “Publications.” http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/oxis/publications

Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Social Networking.” Pew Internet. http://www.pewinternet.org/Topics/Activities-and-Pursuits/Social-Networking.aspx?typeFilter=5

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Apr 7 The Map of the Internet

The Map of the Internet is an ambitious project from Peer 1 Hosting that maps the network of hosts and routing connections that are the foundation of the Internet. Clicking on the image above takes you to the poster in an interactive zooming viewer so you can see the details. You can also read about the making of the poster in this post on the Peer 1 Hosting blog .

It’s a layout of all the networks that are interconnected to form the internet. Some are run by small and large ISPs, university networks, and customer networks - such as Facebook and Google. It’s visual representation of all those networks interconnecting with one another, forming the internet as we know it. Based on the size of the nodes and the thickness of the lines, it speaks to the size of those particular providers and the connections. In technical speak, you’re looking at all the autonomous systems that make up the internet. Each autonomous system is a network operated by a single organization, and has routing connections to some number of neighbouring autonomous systems. The image depicts a graph of 19,869 autonomous system nodes, joined by 44,344 connections. The sizing and layout of the autonomous systems is based on their eigenvector centrality, which is a measure of how central to the network each autonomous system is: an autonomous system is central if it is connected to other autonomous systems that are central.

My apologies for being late posting this one here on the blog. They were giving out free printed 24”x36” posters at SxSW in Austin, TX a couple weeks ago, but the high-resolution PDF is available from the Peer 1 Hosting site.

Thanks to Shobhita for sending me the information and the link!

Apr 11 Evolution of the Cell Phone #infographic

Apr 1 April Fools 2011 On The Web infographic

Mar 21 Map of the Internet 2021

Feb 10 The Internet Map

Mar 31 Map of the Internet 2.0 Poster

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The Invention of the Internet

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 28, 2019 | Original: July 30, 2010

Unlike technologies such as the light bulb or the telephone, the internet has no single “inventor.” Instead, it has evolved over time. The internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War. For years, scientists and researchers used it to communicate and share data with one another. Today, we use the internet for almost everything, and for many people it would be impossible to imagine life without it.

The Sputnik Scare

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first manmade satellite into orbit. The satellite, known as Sputnik, did not do much: It relayed blips and bleeps from its radio transmitters as it circled the Earth. Still, to many Americans, the beach-ball-sized Sputnik was proof of something alarming: While the brightest scientists and engineers in the United States had been designing bigger cars and better television sets, it seemed, the Soviets had been focusing on less frivolous things—and they were going to win the Cold War because of it.

Did you know? Today, almost one-third of the world’s 6.8 billion people use the internet regularly.

After Sputnik’s launch, many Americans began to think more seriously about science and technology. Schools added courses on subjects like chemistry, physics and calculus. Corporations took government grants and invested them in scientific research and development. And the federal government itself formed new agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to develop space-age technologies such as rockets, weapons and computers.

The Birth of the ARPAnet

Scientists and military experts were especially concerned about what might happen in the event of a Soviet attack on the nation’s telephone system. Just one missile, they feared, could destroy the whole network of lines and wires that made efficient long-distance communication possible.

In 1962, a scientist from M.I.T. and ARPA named J.C.R. Licklider proposed a solution to this problem: a “galactic network” of computers that could talk to one another. Such a network would enable government leaders to communicate even if the Soviets destroyed the telephone system.

In 1965, another M.I.T. scientist developed a way of sending information from one computer to another that he called “packet switching.” Packet switching breaks data down into blocks, or packets, before sending it to its destination. That way, each packet can take its own route from place to place. Without packet switching, the government’s computer network—now known as the ARPAnet—would have been just as vulnerable to enemy attacks as the phone system.

On October 29, 1969, ARPAnet delivered its first message: a “node-to-node” communication from one computer to another. (The first computer was located in a research lab at UCLA and the second was at Stanford; each one was the size of a small house.) The message—“LOGIN”—was short and simple, but it crashed the fledgling ARPA network anyway: The Stanford computer only received the note’s first two letters.

The Network Grows

By the end of 1969, just four computers were connected to the ARPAnet, but the network grew steadily during the 1970s.

In 1971, it added the University of Hawaii’s ALOHAnet, and two years later it added networks at London’s University College and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway. As packet-switched computer networks multiplied, however, it became more difficult for them to integrate into a single worldwide “internet.”

By the end of the 1970s, a computer scientist named Vinton Cerf had begun to solve this problem by developing a way for all of the computers on all of the world’s mini-networks to communicate with one another. He called his invention “Transmission Control Protocol,” or TCP. (Later, he added an additional protocol, known as “Internet Protocol.” The acronym we use to refer to these today is TCP/IP.) One writer describes Cerf’s protocol as “the ‘handshake’ that introduces distant and different computers to each other in a virtual space.”

The World Wide Web

Cerf’s protocol transformed the internet into a worldwide network. Throughout the 1980s, researchers and scientists used it to send files and data from one computer to another. However, in 1991 the internet changed again. That year, a computer programmer in Switzerland named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the Internet that we know today.

Since then, the internet has changed in many ways. In 1992, a group of students and researchers at the University of Illinois developed a sophisticated browser that they called Mosaic. (It later became Netscape.) Mosaic offered a user-friendly way to search the Web: It allowed users to see words and pictures on the same page for the first time and to navigate using scrollbars and clickable links.

That same year, Congress decided that the Web could be used for commercial purposes. As a result, companies of all kinds hurried to set up websites of their own, and e-commerce entrepreneurs began to use the internet to sell goods directly to customers. More recently, social networking sites like Facebook have become a popular way for people of all ages to stay connected.

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Network visualization: A detailed guide

A comprehensive overview of network visualization and its applications, with links to videos, blogs and other resources from subject specialists.

Page contents

1. What is network visualization?
2. Why visualize networks?
3. Who visualizes networks?
4. How to build a network visualization
5. Best practice resources
6. Common visualization challenges

What is network visualization?

Network visualization, also known as graph visualization or link analysis, is the process of visually presenting networks of connected entities as links and nodes.

Nodes represent data points, and links represent the connections between them.

To look beyond your flat data model and understand connections in your data, you need powerful network visualization tools.

At Cambridge Intelligence, we help developers build interactive tools for visualizing networks that are 100% customized to their users, their data and the questions they need to answer.

FREE: The ultimate guide to graph visualization

Proven strategies for building successful graph visualization applications

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Why visualize networks?

The world is densely connected. If there’s an interesting relationship in your data, you’ll find value in visualizing networks.

It’s intuitive

Exploring networks as node-link structures instantly makes sense, even to people who’ve never worked with connected data before.

Our brains are great at spotting patterns, but only when the info is in a tangible format. Visualizing data as a network helps you identify trends and outliers quickly.

It’s flexible

Interactive network visualization simplifies complexity, revealing context and connections on demand. It’s ideal for getting a quick overview or focusing on specific connections.

Network visualization gets answers faster

It’s insightful

Through interactive data analysis, you gain deeper knowledge and understand context. That’s hard to achieve with a static, aggregated visualization.

New to network visualization?

If you’re new to visualizing networks, we’ve got a library of resources, blog posts and tutorials to help. A good place to begin is our DataViz 101 blog category

Explore DataViz 101

Who uses network visualization?

Connected data is all around us. We help organizations solve their biggest challenges.

Cyber threat analysts…

…need interactive visualization to reveal network vulnerabilities, detect malware and discover trends.

Cyber security visualization

IT infrastructure managers…

…rely on network mapping software to discover bottlenecks and manage vulnerabilities.

Network mapping software

Security analysts…

…use data visualization to interpret and communicate threat information from multiple sources of intelligence.

Security & Intelligence

Fraud analysts…

…work with data visualization tools to identify, investigate and predict financial crime.

Fraud detection & investigation

Pharma scientists…

…are under pressure to uncover fast insights in noisy pharmaceutical data. Network visualization is the perfect solution.

Pharma data visualization

Supply chain managers…

…identify inefficiencies, manage regulatory compliance and find new ways to innovate using connected data visualization.

Supply chain data visualization

Exploring real-world network visualization

Real-life network visualization examples

In this webinar, data visualization expert Corey Lanum looks at use cases that show:

how network diagrams can help you tell a story and even predict the future
why the ‘when’ is as important as the ‘who’ and ‘what’
how visual appeal isn’t just about esthetics

He does this with examples from the worlds of intelligence, cyber security and financial crime.

Watch the on-demand webinar

What types of networks can be visualized?

We think there are no networks that CAN’T be visualized. If your data contains complex connections, you’ll find value in visualizing it. We’ve even started mapping the internet.

Here are a few more common examples we’ve worked on with our customers:

Infrastructure

From the internet to gas pipelines, corporate IT systems to global telecoms networks: network and timeline visualization are the best tools for making sense of complex infrastructure data.

Network mapping software for infrastructure

IT networks

Understanding big, complex telecoms networks is challenging. With the help of network visualization, it doesn’t need to be.

Network alert and network topology visualization

Supply chain

More and more businesses are digitizing their supply chain processes. Our latest demo shows how KronoGraph, our time-based visual analytics toolkit, can support a reliable management tool with supply chain data visualization at its heart.

Supply chain: the spinach story

Network visualization of a section of the internet

Visualizing the internet

The internet can be a chaotic and unpredictable network.

See how the Syntropy project is building a better way, with connected data visualization at its core.

Decentralizing the internet

How to build an interactive network visualization

So, you’ve chosen the tools and tech stack that work for you. It’s time to start designing the perfect network visualization. Find out how to build a network analysis dashboard that gives a great user experience – and take it to the next level with powerful timeline visualization.

Recommended viewing: The right tools for the job

In this short video, you’ll learn about the benefits of using KeyLines and ReGraph, our JavaScript software development kits, for your connected data visualization project.

Network visualization best practices

Building a great user experience.

Visual network analysis dashboards that work

Open any data management app and the first thing you’ll see is a complex data dashboard of bar graphs, pie charts and metrics. But if your users need to track, measure and analyze connected data, what they really need is visual network analysis.

Visual network analysis

Get the perfect look & feel for your data visualizations

Building a data visualization into your products is about more than just putting information on a screen. Your visualization is probably part of a larger, carefully-designed, product UI.

Getting the perfect UX

Visualizing networks that evolve over time

Explore methods for visualizing dynamic networks

Dynamic network visualization methods explained

Most connected data has a time-stamped element. Sometimes, that time element holds the insight that unlocks everything else. A time bar gives users the ability to filter and summarize time-based connected data without overwhelming them.

Explore methods for visualizing dynamic networks

KronoGraph: the timeline visualization toolkit

Take your connected data visualization to the next level with KronoGraph, the first toolkit for scalable timeline visualizations that reveal patterns in time data.

Discover the KronoGraph toolkit

Visualizing data at scale

Layouts for visualizing large networks

There’s no more famous network than the internet itself. But highly connected networks present data visualization challenges. In this blog, we’ll map out the shape of a small portion of the internet with a network chart.

Mapping a section of the internet

Network alert and network topology visualization

Understanding big, complex network topologies, like IT infrastructure or telecoms networks is challenging. With the help of network visualization, it doesn’t need to be.

Visualizing network topologies

Network visualization tools and tutorials

When it comes to building your own web application visualizing connected data, you have options .

There are standalone tools, or community-built open source code libraries, or you can create something in-house from scratch. If you want the best of all worlds, our commercial SDKs are market leaders. They deliver the customizability and flexibility of in-house components, with the reliability, robustness, performance and advanced functionality of a technology backed by a dedicated team of experts.

For JavaScript developers Enjoy the flexibility to code how you like. Add connected data visualization to your applications that work anywhere, as part of any stack.

For React developers With ReGraph’s simple data-driven API, it’s quick and easy to add connected data visualizations to your React applications.

Request a free trial of our SDKs

Some common network visualization challenges

Hairballs, snowstorms and starbursts can be a problem for many network visualization projects, cluttering up charts and concealing crucial insights from investigators and analysts. But we have solutions – click on the images below to learn more.

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TechTheLead

Visual Representation Of The Evolution Of The Internet Truly Leaves You Speechless

In 2003 Barrett Gibson Lyon created the Opte Project, an internet mapping project that uses virtual graphics and open source software to provide an accurate map of the internet.

It all began when the internet entrepreneur was finishing his studies at California State University in Sacramento while also working as a penetration tester. Which, in essence, is an ethical hacker that helps businesses identify and resolve vulnerabilities that affect their digital security. And the formula he came up with at work put the basis of the network mapping visualization that is the Opte Project.

The Electric Eye – The Opte Project

“ That formula ended up being an easy piece of software to write, so I just started having this software do all the work for me, ” state Lyon.

The maps looked like a nebula of countless, overlapping starbursts connected by branch-like lines that represent the internet at a specific point in time.

“ What you’re looking at is not a real world. You’re looking at a representation of this different dimension, so to speak, ” says Lyon. “T he Internet is really big, very connected, and extremely complex. It’s this whole world you can’t see. That’s the fun part of visualizing it. ”

The growth of the Internet from 1997 to 2021.

For instance, in a 2003 print screen of such a map from the project, the different colored lines indicate the location of the IP space, while each line shows the communication between two internet protocol (IP) addresses and the length of the lines denotes the delay between the two nodes. Red lines, for example, represent Asia and the Pacific Islands, while the dark blue ones correspond to North America.

The image itself “ was based on a technology called ‘traceroute, ’” that displays possible routes and measures the transit delays of packets across an Internet Protocol network. “ It would be like driving each road in the world systematically and then drawing that out, ” explains Lyon.

“When I look at it, each one of those little squiggles and wiggles is human beings doing something,” Lyon says. “People actually using the network, building the network, literally going across oceans and mountains with fiber optic cables and digging ditches. All of that work is reflected in one snapshot. But some countries are not actually very connected and that enables control.”

The Opthe Project is as much art as it is research and documentation.

However, a 2010 exhibit of the original Opte viewable at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and in an edition of Discover Magazine, used Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as data points instead of traceroutes, in order to create a more accurate view of the internet. More recent maps even show BGP route leaks, which are incidents that involve “ the propagation of routing announcement(s) beyond their intended scope ” according to The Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) definition, or more exactly, events where the data that was meant to go on a certain path was accidentally or maliciously redirected to other parts of the network.

The Opte Project Can Also Teach Humanity

What’s even more interesting is that the visualizations can also detect the effects of natural disasters and wars, since these are mostly always accompanied by large-scale internet service outages. Such incidents include this year’s Myanmar internet disruptions that were ordered by the military after people mobilized for protests amid reports of uprisings and the detention of political leaders or Iran’s Internet blackout from 2019. An event which was ordered by the Supreme National Security Council and imposed by the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology (Ministry of ICT) following “Bloody November” a series of nationwide civil protests caused by a staggering 50%–200% increase in fuel prices. Lyon confirmed that he is collecting more data in order to create a more accurate picture of any major recent events.

Ever since its conception, the Opte Project has gathered worldwide recognition and has been featured by Time, Cornell University, New Scientist, and Kaspersky Lab, while several of its maps are displayed in art galleries and exhibits such as The Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Science. Opte’s creator, Lyon has even been called a hero by the American Organization the National Public Radio for his contributions in tracking down Russian extortion groups responsible for denial of service attacks (DoS attacks), cyber-attacks that shut down a computer or a network by disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. His work has even been featured in the cyber-thriller “Fatal System Error” while his help and the information he provided to multiple law enforcement groups led to the capture of three Russian men responsible for extorting money from banks, Internet casinos, and other web-based businesses.

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The shape of the internet.

The web of connections that makes up the Internet looks a lot like a medusa jellyfish.

‘Jailbreaks’ bring out the evil side of chatbots

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Teen-created software IDs skin conditions, risky drivers and more

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How different are your online and offline personalities?

Although our digital identity is fragmented, research suggests that our various online personas lead back to the same personality

O ur habits define us. But how true is this for our digital habits? Are we the same online as offline? In the early days of the internet, it was probably safe to assume that our online behaviours did not reveal much about our real-world personas. This notion was popularised by the “on the internet, nobody knows you’re dog” caption of a famous New Yorker cartoon .

As the internet gained prominence in our lives, we gave up anonymity and also the desire to mask our real identity online. Indeed, online activities are no longer separable from our real lives, but an integral part of it. According to Ofcom , UK adults are now spending over 20 hours a week online: twice as much as 10 years ago. Similar metrics have been reported for the US , with the biggest chunk of online time (around 30% ) devoted to social networking.

Like in reality TV shows, it is harder to fake it online when you are being observed for a longer period of time. Conversely, deliberate deception and impression management are relatively straightforward during short-term interactions, such as job interviews, first dates and dinner parties. We all have a window for displaying the bright side of our personality and adhering to social etiquette, but what happens when a great portion of our lives is being broadcasted?

Although we are more than the history of our browser, it is feasible that our web searches and web page visits, emails and social network activity contain traces of our personality. Prior to the digital age, our identity, style and values were mainly revealed by our material possessions, which psychologists described as our extended self. But human inferences were required to translate these signals into a personality profile.

Today, many of our valuable possessions have dematerialised. As Russell W Belk , an eminent consumer psychologist at Canada’s York University, noted: “Our information, communications, photos, videos, music, calculations, messages, written words, and data are now largely invisible and immaterial until we choose to call them forth. They are composed of electronic streams of ones and zeroes that may be stored locally or in some hard-to-imagine cloud.”

Yet in psychological terms there is no difference between the meaning of these dematerialised digital artefacts and our physical possessions – they both help us express important aspects of our identity to others and these identity claims provide the core ingredients of our digital reputation. A great deal of scientific research has highlighted the portability of our analogue selves to the digital world. The common theme of these studies is that, although the internet may have provided an escapism from everyday life, it is mostly mimicking it.

Most notably, our typical patterns of social media activity can be accurately predicted by scores on scientifically valid personality tests. This research is the product of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre , led by Dr Michal Kosinski (now at Stanford). For instance, studies show that Facebook “likes” reflect how extroverted, intellectual and prudent we are. Mining tweets reveals how extroverted and emotionally stable people are. This can be done by analysing the content of tweets (personality predicts what words you are more likely to use) as well as the number of tweets and followers people have. Twitter can also be used to infer dark side personality characteristics, such as how machiavellian, psychopathic or narcissistic people are.

In addition, studies indicate that our media preferences and online purchases also reflect elements of our personality. Thus computer-generated algorithms may not just predict what you will watch on Netflix, listen to on Spotify, or buy on Amazon – the may also explain why. Our own research has highlighted many associations between personality and both reported and actual artistic and musical preferences. Unsurprisingly, research has also identified a connection between online porn consumption and impulsive/obsessional personality features.

William James , the father of American psychology, once suggested that we have as many personalities as the number of situations we are in. Although our digital identity may be fragmented, it seems clear that our various online personas are all digital breadcrumbs of the same persona; different symptoms of our same core self. We are still far from the development of a Shazam for the soul, but the more we can integrate and synthesise our segregated online data, the more complete our picture of ourselves will be.

Businesses will clearly benefit from leveraging this data and the corresponding algorithms for making sense of it. To the degree that they can overcome ethical and legal barriers – presumably by enabling consumers to opt in in a conscious and transparent way – they will be able to move beyond programmatic marketing tools that predict future behaviours to deeper psychological tools that can explain and understand it. This may not only enable them to personalise and curate products and services more effectively, but also educate individuals about their own personality and perhaps even help them become smarter and happier consumers.

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IMAGES

A visual representation of the internet [Infographic]
Maps of the Internet
Global network connection. World map point and line composition concept
This Is How Internet Works
The Internet Map: a visual representation of the relationship between
How Is the Internet Connected? [Infographic]

VIDEO

IETF 119: Concise Binary Object Representation Maintenance and Extensions (CBOR) 2024-03-22 05:00
Equality in Representation-Digital Divide #india #digitalconnectivity
Evolution of the Internet (by Dr. Larry Roberts)
The Cyberspace Domain
Unraveling Proposition Symbols in AI #artificialintelligence
It's The System, Stupid! (More Hbomb Plagiarism Crap)

COMMENTS

How the Internet Affects Societies
The Internet in the developing world. An Internet Society survey of 2,100 people across the world has found that people in developing markets remain optimistic that the benefits of connecting far outweigh the perceived risks. On the contrary, in the Western hemisphere, conversations about the Internet risk losing the sense of genuine excitement ...
Media Constructions of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity
Clark's Stage Model of Representation articulates a key organizing principle for understanding how media may construct various depictions of social groups (Clark, 1973; ... The discussion first entails video games and Internet news websites. Speculation about the role social media will play with regard to these depictions follows.
The evolution of the Internet from 1997 to 2021
This visual representation of the Internet is a wonderful educational tool, as it offers a quick vision of the Internet and networking. It has indeed been used in many educational discussions, publications, books, museums, etc. to illustrate how the Internet looks like. The project is truly interesting to picture the immense size of the ...
The Internet Map: a visual representation of the relationship between
The Internet Map is an impressive visualization of 350,000 websites and how they are linked to each other. ... The Internet Map: a visual representation of the relationship between 350,000 websites.
Seeing the internet
You'll be communicating with friends, family and colleagues using email and/or social media. You might be using the internet to undertake household tasks like shopping or banking or arranging for your central heating to be serviced. You might stream music or a movie, or watch catch-up TV. And of course, if you're an OU student you'll be using ...
The Four Visions Shaping the Way We Use the Internet
In 2017, reflecting on his original proposal for the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee wrote in The Guardian that he imagined the internet as "an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries.". But today, 30 years on from the invention of the web, the ideas of openness, transparency ...
(PDF) Social representations of the internet for the elderly
Objective: To describe the social representations of Internet among the elderly and to compare objectification and anchoring processes of elderly people with different levels in Internet usage ...
How Social Media Shapes Our Identity
Nausicaa Renner writes on how the Internet—especially social-media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat—makes it difficult for people to escape their previous identities.
History of the Internet
The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks.The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and ...
THE INTERNET
The Internet 1997 - 2021. The Internet is one of humanity's most important creations. This video takes you through a journey of incredible engineering. Starting from the first routing table captures (provided by the University of Oregon's RouteViews project) in 1997, we walk through the first Internet's astonishing growth to 2021.
How the Internet Shapes Who We Are
Key points. The use and design of the internet influence how we think about ourselves. Social media splinter our self-representations and experiences. Algorithms propel highly individualized ...
The Impact of the Internet on Society: A Global Perspective
For instance, media often report that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of alienation, isolation, depression, and withdrawal from society. In fact, available evidence shows that there is either no relationship or a positive cumulative relationship between the Internet use and the intensity of sociability.
PDF Internet Atlas: A Geographic Database of the Internet
The starting point for Atlas is a geographically anchored repre-sentation of the physical Internet including (i) nodes (e.g., hosting facilities and data centers), (ii) conduits/links that connect these nodes, and (iii) relevant meta data (e.g., source provenance). This physical representation is built by using search to identify primary source ...
The Map of the Internet
It's visual representation of all those networks interconnecting with one another, forming the internet as we know it. Based on the size of the nodes and the thickness of the lines, it speaks to the size of those particular providers and the connections. In technical speak, you're looking at all the autonomous systems that make up the internet.
The Invention of the Internet
The Internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War. Unlike technologies such as the light bulb or the telephone, the Internet has no ...
PDF Chapter 1: Representing and Transmitting Information Unit 1
We make heavy use of the Internet Simulator in these lessons to enforce rules about binary representation or the activity designed to use it. The configuration of the Internet Simulator changes slightly for each lesson that uses it, but it is always about point-to-point communication: you sending a message to a partner using only bits.
PDF The compositional architecture of the Internet
The compositional architecture of the Internet Pamela Zave AT&T Labs—Research Bedminster, New Jersey [email protected] Jennifer Rexford Princeton University Princeton, New Jersey [email protected] ABSTRACT Contrary to the "classic" Internet architecture familiar to most peo-ple, today's Internet is a composition of a wide variety ...
Network visualization: an intro to visual network analysis
Network visualization, also known as graph visualization or link analysis, is the process of visually presenting networks of connected entities as links and nodes. Nodes represent data points, and links represent the connections between them. To look beyond your flat data model and understand connections in your data, you need powerful network ...
Agency and representation in internet governance
Significantly, "avoiding Internet fragmentation" has become a priority for global institutions and ranks high on the agenda of the UN Secretary-General in the planned Global Digital Compact. Despite the importance of agency and representation in this space, we have limited systematic knowledge of the changes occurring under the global radar.
Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality
At times both laudatory and critical, this book illustrates Wikipedia's struggle to combat systemic biases and lack of representation of marginalized topics as it becomes the standard bearer for equitable and accessible representation of reality in an age of digital disinformation and fake news. Being an important and timely contribution to the ...
Visual Representation Of The Evolution Of The Internet ...
The maps looked like a nebula of countless, overlapping starbursts connected by branch-like lines that represent the internet at a specific point in time. "What you're looking at is not a real world. You're looking at a representation of this different dimension, so to speak," says Lyon. "The Internet is really big, very connected ...
PDF The internet as a democratising force
The internet as a democratising force The internet has the power to be a tool of democracy, but its potential in this respect is at risk. This is because the same technology that can be a positive force for the discursive values underlying democracy can also be a tool of control. The same technology that facilitates discourse creates
Modelling the Internet
In this activity pupils learn that the internet is a vast network of computers and other devices connected across the world, ... Using and applying skills in creating models, maps and graphical representation of information; This can be done by: Locating the world's countries, using maps to focus on Europe (including the location of Russia ...
The Shape of the Internet
The Internet is really good at connecting people, and Science News for Kids is a perfect example. I live in Minneapolis. My editors work in Chicago and Washington, D.C. And you can look at this Web site on computers all over the world. It seems so simple, but the Internet is a complex web of connections. And that web looks a lot like a medusa ...
How different are your online and offline personalities?
Unsurprisingly, research has also identified a connection between online porn consumption and impulsive/obsessional personality features. William James, the father of American psychology, once ...
A schematic representation of Internet AS-level map with ...
Download scientific diagram | A schematic representation of Internet AS-level map with a router level map of an AS. from publication: The Influence of Network Topological Models on the Prediction ...
Sinking the Internet Iceberg: Why We Need to Redefine the Web
The internet iceberg is often used to illustrate how web spaces are structured. This includes the surface web—the smaller, visible part of the iceberg easily navigable through standard search engines like Google—and the deep web, the largest part of the iceberg including unindexed or encrypted pages. The dark web is usually depicted as the ...
Visualizing the Social Media Use of Each Generation
Social media sites measure the number of unique users on the platform each month as a metric of success. Below is a snapshot of the five major social media sites shown in today's graphic and their active user count. Monthly Active Users (MAU) as of July 2019. Facebook: 2.4 billion. YouTube: 2 billion.