The Internet

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The Internet

• Lecture Notes for HI6301 - Week 16
• Jiajie Zhang
• April 26, 1999

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Evolution of Media - 1

• Episodic Culture
• Apes
• 1.5 million years ago
• Procedural skills
• Event perception
• Cannot re-represent a situation to reflect upon
  it

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Evolution of Media - 2

• Mimetic Culture
• Homo Erectus
• 0.3 - 1.5 million years ago
• Able to mime (copy, represent)

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Evolution of Media - 3

• Mythical Culture
• Homo Sapiens
• 0.05 - 0.3 million years ago
• Speech organ
• Oral language
• Narratives
• Rituals

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Evolution of Media - 4

• Theoretical Culture
• Modern man
• 0.05 million years to today
• External symbolic systems (painting, writing,
  drawing, etc.)

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Evolution of Media - 5

• Internet Culture

THIS SPACE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
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Stage 4
Stage 3
Stage 2
Stage 1
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Stages of Transitions

• Stage 1 - Episodic to Mimetic
• biological change
• Stage 2 - Mimetic to Mythical
• biological change
• Stage 3 - Mythical to Theoretical
• non-biological change
• Stage 4 - Theoretical to Internet
• non-biological change

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Orality vs Literacy

• Internal memory record
• fixed physical medium
• constrained format
• impermanent
• large but limited capacity
• limited size of single entries
• not easily refined
• retrieval paths constrained
• limited perceptual access in audition, virtual
  none in vision

• External memory record
• virtually unlimited media
• unconstrained reformattable
• may be permanent
• virtually unlimited
• virtually unlimited
• unlimited iterative refinement
• retrieval paths unconstrained
• unlimited perceptual access, especially in
  vision spatial structure useful as an
  organizational device

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Stages of Transitions

• How big is the web? (Murphy, 1998)
• 10 terabytes (104 GB)
• 200 million documents
• doubling every 12 months
• reachable by 50 million people
• 3 of 300 pentabytes (3x106 GB) on-line info
• 1 UCB library

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Measuring the Web

• How big is the web? (Bray, 1995)
• 11,366,121 unique URLs
• 223,851 unique servers
• 89,271 unique sites

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Measuring the Web

• What is the average page like?
• 6500 bytes (1050 words)
• 50 of all pages contain at least one image
• 15 of pages contain exactly one image

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Measuring the Web

• How richly connected is it?
• Outbound
• 75 have at least one URL
• lt 10 have exactly one URL
• Inbound
• 1-10 for 85 sites
• 0 for 5 sites
• 80 sites have no off-site URLs

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Measuring the Web

• Biggest and Most Visible Sites
• Incoming URLs
• UIUC, MIT, Yahoo, CMU, Netscape, Stanford
• Outgoing URLs
• Yahoo, CMU, Stanford, ANL, UIUC

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Measuring the Web

• What formats are being used?
• 87 HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)
• 5 SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)

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Measuring the Web

• How fast is the Internet growing?
• See the stock prices of a few Internet companies
• Is this speed sustainable?

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Yahoo!
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American Online
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Amazon