William Gibson and the internet

Essay by Anonymous UserUniversity, Ph.D.B, June 1996

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Introduction

The words "Internet" and "world wide web" are becoming everyday use these days, it has exploded into the mass market of information and advertising. There are bad points about the "net" as well as good points, this relatively new medium is growing at such a rate that the media have to take it seriously.

This new form of communication was mainly populated by small groups of communities, but now that it is getting much easier to access the web these groups are growing.

The word Cyberpunk is nothing new in the world of the "net" and to science fiction readers , and it is this term which names most of the online communities . Within the Cyberpunk cultures there are sub cultures such as hackers, phreaks ,ravers etc.. all have a connection with new technologies. The term Cyberpunk was originated in Science Fiction Literature, writers such as William Gibson tell stories of future worlds, cultures and the Internet.

it is william gibson and the cyberpunks who have carried out some of the most important mappings of our present moment and its future trends during the past decade. The present, in these mappings, is thus viewed from the persceptive of a future that is visible from within the experiences and trends of the current moment, from this perpscetive, cyberpunk can be read as a sort of social theory.

Chapter 1

Internet history

The Internet is a network of computer networks, the most important of which was called ARPANET(Advanced Research Projects Agency NETwork), a wide area experimental network connecting hosts and terminal servers together. Rules were set up to supervise the allocation of addresses and to create voluntary standards for the network. The ARPANET was built between October and December 1969 by a US company called Bolt, Beranak and...