Janet Abbate’s book Inventing the Internet is an important work that provides both a breakdown of the important technology that contributed to the creation of the Internet and the social and cultural factors that moved to shape the course of development for the Internet. The author has a keen understanding of the various things that helped to shape the future of the Internet. Using this understanding, she goes through the major historical factors that made the Internet what it is today. One part technical and another part layman, this book is something that can be read and digested not only by those with a keen understanding of networking packets, but also for those people who are just looking for basic information on how something like the Internet could possibly work.
The author begins by discussing the important concept of packet switching. The beginning of the book is designed to provide an overview of what the Internet is and how it works, which is something that is necessary for the rest of the book. The concept for the author, it seems, was to provide a picture of what the Internet currently is in order to discuss how it came to be that way. The early part of the book discusses the origins of packet switching, especially dealing with how the Cold War came to be such an important player in the process. The next part of the book discusses the formation of ARPANET, but it does much more than that. It attempts to tie the middle part of the book with the book’s origins. In discussing how ARPANET came to be, the author discusses the various social motivations for it. As she notes, necessity is the mother of invention, so a major reason why this came to be had to do with human necessity. By discussing this, the author is providing something of a preview of what is to come in the book. The author is going to discuss, in essence, why so many different groups invested so much time and energy in developing the various parts of the Internet. The first part of the book discussed the Cold War, which can be easily seen and explained as the ultimate in motivation for the military to develop its technology. On top of that, the book provides a discussion of the ways in which the Internet grew out of the need for an evolution in the way that human beings think, with technology playing a major role in that process.
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In addition, important aspects of culture played a role in the formation of the Internet. One of the parts of this book that became very important was the portion that discussed the role of the Internet in the international realm. The author discusses how the Internet was received in various parts of the world, and perhaps more important than that, the contributions that different parts of the world made to the Internet as a consumer product. While the Internet feels like an American thing, and at the very least a Western thing, many influences have come from other parts of the world. Even now, the world has seen that the Middle East has been able to harness the power of the Internet to organize a political movement. When looking at complex systems, we see that culture can make the system more powerful by providing a different way of approaching the system. When each culture sees a system through their own values system, it becomes clear that difficult approaches might work. The Internet, it seems, is the perfect entity for this kind of multi-culturalism. Since it is designed a tool where sharing of ideas is simple and where people are completely free to make it what they want to make it, culture has played a role in showing various groups of people different elements of what the Internet could become.
