Abstract
In the twenty-first century, the world has been restructured around the Internet. From economies, cultural activities, government policies, commercial enterprises, military action, sporting events, and educational policies to health policies and procedures are all conceived from the starting point of their presence on the web. Thus, considering its growth and the impact of the global computer network on our day-to-day lives, the purpose of this chapter is to present a historical perspective of the implementation and popularization of the Internet, with particular attention to the situation in Brazil. This chapter covers the construction of the Internet, revealing a process that began at the end of the 1950s, and focuses on the transformations it went through between 1995 and 2017. From the formative nodes that grew into what is now the Internet, the chapter traces the path of how its adoption and its popularization in Brazil resulted from the tension between the different sectors involved in its installation and in the efforts to expand the global computer network.
The second flood will be endless. There is no solid bed beneath the ocean of information. We should accept this as our new reality. We have to teach our children to swim, to float, perhaps to navigate.
Lévy (2000, 15)
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Notes
- 1.
Roy Ascott, British artist and theoretician. Since the 1960s, he has pioneered the interaction between cybernetics, telematics, and art. Ascott undertook several projects in global network and published more than 70 texts. Professor of technology at the University of Plymouth, England, and adjunct professor of design/media arts at the University of California Los Angeles
- 2.
Chapter 10 addresses the theme of online health information.
- 3.
Launched on October 4, 1957, Sputnik was the first in a series of artificial satellites created by the Soviet Union. Among its purposes was the contribution in collecting information for a possible space travel. As Heitor Shimizu (2006, 18) explains, “today, with so much equipment in orbit of the earth, sending signals to all parts of the planet, it is difficult to understand the importance of its precursor. But in 1957, only 12 years after the end of World War II, when television became popular and rock rehearsed its first steps, the little metal ball thrown at his was a shock.”
- 4.
“On a TCP/IP network, each equipment must have an individual address, capable of identifying it on the network. Those addresses, called IP addresses, are 32-bit numbers, represented by 4 fields of integer decimal numbers, separated by the dot character. Each field can assume values from 0 to 225 and corresponds to 1 byte of the IP address in the form of bits. Each IP address contains the network address to which the device belongs and the address of the device itself within that network.” See Cyclades (2000, 8).
- 5.
For Pierre Lévy (2000, 27) the WWW is “an Internet function that brings together all the documents and hypertexts that feed it in a single hypertext or hyperdocument (comprising images and sounds).”
- 6.
The number presented by the website for December 31, 2017 is 4,156,932,140 users, 54% of the world population.
- 7.
Bit stands for “binary digit” and is the smallest unit of data used in computing.
- 8.
- 9.
In Brazil, the Internet Steering Committee was created by Inter-ministerial Ordinance n.147, dated May 31, 1995, and implemented by Decree No. 4829, dated March 09, 2003. Its mission is to define strategic guidelines for the use and development of the Internet in the country, consider security procedures for the network, conduct surveys, as well as respond to the guidelines and execution of the registration of domain names and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. To learn more about CGI, see https://www.cgi.br
- 10.
Chapter 6 analyzes activity profiles in virtual communities of chronic kidney patients, organized in Facebook.
- 11.
On November 25, 2010, after a police operation to combat trafficking in the neighborhood of Vila Cruzeiro, traffickers who managed to escape the siege organized by the police forces of Rio de Janeiro took refuge in Complexo do Alemão. Seeking to arrest the criminals, on November 26 the Military Police and the Civil Police took access points of access Complex. The response of the traffickers came with attacks in different parts of the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro (bus burnings, vehicle assaults, commercial establishments and to passersby, destruction of ATMs). In response, on November 28, on a Sunday morning, the security forces decided to invade the Complex with a force of 800 soldiers from the Army Parachute Infantry Brigade, 300 Federal Police (PF) officers, and 1300 Military and Civil Police. The agents had tactical support from Army and Navy armored vehicles, as well as vehicles from the Special Operations Battalion of the PM (Bope). At the time, the expectation was that between 500 and 600 traffickers were in the Complexo do Alemão. For more information, see G1 (2010).
- 12.
See Ghonim (2013).
- 13.
In Brazil, government and private research agencies use this classification in alphabetical order to frame social stratification, considering average family incomes. Basically, the relationship between income and social class is distributed in the following groups: A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2, D, and E. While in group A1 we have the families with the highest income, at the other end, D and E, we have widely recognized situations of social vulnerability. Therefore, in strata D and E we have the poorest segments of the Brazilian population, possibly being the main targets to be reached in public policies that aim at changes in the country’s human development indexes. See Kamakura and Mazzon (2013).
- 14.
Chapter 8 discusses the use of information and communication technologies to promote active aging.
- 15.
The issue of bullying and cybebullying is addressed in Chap. 12.
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Maynard, D.C.S. (2019). An Introduction to the History of the Internet: A Brazilian Perspective. In: Pereira Neto, A., Flynn, M. (eds) The Internet and Health in Brazil . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99289-1_2
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