How the internet grew from an expression of 1960s counterculture (log on, tune in, drop out)
The Internet is designed the way it is to accommodate any number of practical considerations, but it’s also an expression of 1960s counterculture. No single computer runs the network. No one is in charge. It’s a paradise of equality and anonymity, an electronic commune.
In the 1970s the communes faded away, but the Internet only grew, and that countercultural attitude lingered. The presiding myth of the Internet through the 1980s and 1990s was that when you went online, you could shed your earthly baggage and be whoever you wanted. Your age, your gender, your race, your job, your marriage, where you lived, where you went to school — all that fell away. In effect, the social experiments of the 1960s were restaged online.
Log on, tune in, drop out.
We all know how that ended. When the Web arrived in the early 1990s, it went mainstream. The number of people on the Internet exploded, from 2.6 million in 1990 to 385 million in 2000, and we messed up the scene. The equality and anonymity that made the Internet so liberating in its early days turned out to be disastrously disinhibiting. They made the Internet a haven for pornographers and hatemongers and a free-for-all for scammers, hackers and virus writers.
(From TIME’s Person of the Year article)
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037183_2037185,00.html #ixzz18DvgiSRI
