The Internet: The Basics

The Basics

by Jason Whittaker

The The Basics provides a concise and clearly written introduction to the study of the internet. Covering its practical application as a tool for research, as well as issues for communicating and designing for the web, this book also questions the ways in which the internet has changed our cultures, societies and identities.
The areas covered in this book
* the history and development of the internet
* how it works
* how to use it for research and communication
* advice on good design practice for the web
* how regulation is changing to deal with the new media, as well as questions of ethics
* how the internet is changing our social, political, psychological and economic relations with others.
The The Basics is a non-technical, comprehensive guide to the internet, covering all aspects of the medium and its cultural and practical effects that will be of interest to anyone thinking of studying the subject.

Paperback

First published June 20, 2002

Reviews

[Alexander Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes, it's kind of fun to read books about internet research in the days before huge social media platforms like Facebook. Some of us might even be able to reminisce on those days, but for those of us who grew up in a Google, Amazon, and Meta dominated online world, this book might as well be ancient internet history. As a matter of fact, the reason I picked up this book in the first place was because an anonymous professor at my university put it out on our "free books" shelf, a sure sign that it's either outlived its intended academic use or that the professor is now emeritus. However, curiosity got the better of me because of how dated it was. How did people write about the internet as a communication research space during the time I was becoming aware of it? I didn't really know, but I did sort of grow up in it, so maybe it would be a fun text.

While some people don't remember, before Facebook, there was Myspace, and before Myspace there was a site called Xanga, and before that was GeoCities. At the time of this book publishing, that was the state of social media platforms. For those that don't know, a GeoCities profile was kind of technically difficult to set up. In fact this book refers to GeoCities' parent company Yahoo! a bit as it was the dominant search engine of the time.

I actually really enjoyed this book. It has unexpected breadth and simplicity about what the internet was for the time. It surveys the necessary underlying technologies of internet as a telecomm infrastructure (something social media research and internet research today almost never discusses), the ways people can access it, the dominant companies on it, the politics of the time including cyber-libertarianism that marks books like Levy's Hackers and others, the cultures online, and even memes.

So, I'll indulge myself by writing a little about why I find memes to exemplify the of "breadth" of this book fascinating since it's one of my favorite topics of internet research.

While the connection of memes and the internet were not unheard of, at the time of writing this book "internet memes" were not really what people called those pieces of media at this point in time. Occasionally people did reference memes as potentially a thing that would be accelerated by digital media, however earliest I came to know this concept was around 2004, two years after this book was published. I wasn't even in high school yet. At the time of this book's publication, people primarily cited Richard Dawkins for the meme concept because the idea of an "internet meme" as we know it today did not exist yet. Dawkins was not a fan of this characterization of his concept, yet there were many of his contemporaries who did theorize memes to be characterized this way online a few years prior. The earliest books I'm aware of attempting to characterize memes for online culture is Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine in 1999, which was quickly followed by Robert Aunger's edited volume called Darwinizing Culture which was published in 2000, where Blackmore was also a chapter author, followed by Aunger's full book authorship of The Electric Meme. Undoubtedly it's within these interpretations of Darwin's meme that Whittaker is writing. However, ultimately this characterization of meme was long dropped for Limor Shifman's "internet meme" concept which took loose inspirations from the spirit of Blackmore's meme, but this characterization of memes didn't come about until 2013. So the fact that this book touches on the subject as an actual empirical interest of internet research means that for a survey book on the topic, it touches the bleeding edge of what was to come over the next decade. That's impressive!

But that's not the only case this book makes these connections. This book gives some great details on cyber identities, such as race and queer cultures that were also not regularly discussed in literature until slightly after this book. This book is very readable! (I read it in less than 2 hours over three days, right after my breakfast each morning.) The book does read more like a survey of entry points for internet research. But it suffices to say, this book was on top of its stuff for when it was written! While I don't see myself using this book in any serious capacity, this was a fun read.

Would I recommend this to a serious internet researcher getting started today? No. Would I recommend it to an internet archivist/historian? Maybe! This book could function as a touchstone to a lot of what rhetorically made the internet different during and after the dotcom bubble. It serves as a uniquely beautifully written book about a moment in time that covers that moment in time particularly well.