Internet Development & Dependency

Recently my wife and I moved to the outskirts of Springfield Oregon to a little farmhouse in the Camp Creek area. Both children of the 80’s, we grew up during a time when the Internet was not the main way of communicating, doing business or education. The Internet slowly crept into our lives fueling our dependency for this technology, especially over the last decade. Neither my wife or I realized just how much we relied on the Internet in our day day lives until our only option for broadband at our new home was satellite service, which has a 15 Gigabyte per month cap for downloading and uploading data to the web. This restriction made us realize just how dependent we had become, and how a the result of having bandwidth cap altered our lifestyle.

Over the course of this term I plan to delve into the subject of Internet dependency to see other people’s views and opinions on the subject, and to see what other people use the Internet for. I am interested to see if others are as dependent as my wife and I found ourselves to be. I plan to use surveys and interviews to collect this information. Survey services such as SurveyMonkey will allow me to poll other students at the University, which I will then create charts and graphs to display the data.

In addition to Internet usage I will look at how the Internet has come to be what it is today. Without some key technological milestones dating back over 60 years, we would not have what has evolved into an interactive network used in all facets of our lives. The Association for Computing Machinery is home to several publications that will help me illustrate this history. I will create a visual timeline of key milestones showing the development its birth to its current state.

The motivation behind this project started due to the limited options which my wife and I found for Internet service in our semi-rural community. The Federal Communication Commission has information available depicting the spatial distribution for broadband availability across the nation. I plan to incorporate this data by way of maps and graphs into my project to illustrate geographic distribution of service and show “Internet Deserts” across the nation.

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http://www.pewinternet.org/

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