Here's a summary of week 4's lecture - A short history of the internet!

• Cyberspace is a common mental geography,built, in turn, by consensus and revolution, canon and experiment; a territory swarming with data and lies, with mind stuff and memories of nature, with a million voices and two million eyes in a silent,invisible concert of inquiry deal-making, dream sharing, and simple beholding.
• The Internet is the sum of interconnected computer hardware and the software that runs it, the Web is a particular application of the Internet that is particularly easy to use and Cyberspace is the sum of users' imaginations as they use the Internet.
• The internet, is a network of networks. These networks include servers, mainframes and personal computers and many other devices that use CMC (computer-mediated communications) technology, loosely interconnected by the telephone system and, more recently, broad-band cable and satellite services, to link people around the world into an information-sharing system.
• The World Wide Web, is one particular use of the Internet that emerged in the 1990s as people generally began to see the potential for computers to communicate with each other as a matter of course. The Web includes all the internet sites that people have made available on servers around the world.
• A working definition of cyberspace might be: A conceptual space where words, relationships, data, wealth and power are manifested by people using Computer Mediated Communication technologies.
• Netiquette is etiquette on the Internet. Poor netiquette because you're new is one thing, but such practices as spam (unsolicited email) and flaming(abusive communications) are another matter. They are bad behaviour that disrupts other people's use of the internet.
• The growth of cyberspace is generating a new grammar that is shaping a new approach to economics. Its interactivity suggests new ways to think about capital that reflects new ways to do things with each other:
  Social network capital - the value in person to person interaction though we might never meet
  Knowledge capital - the value in ideas means that sharing information equals sharing power
  Cultural capital - the value in the values we share and that allow us to live creative lives in a civil society.

A fairly standard, easy to understand history of the net. We also watched the end of alphaville, was weird to say the least but still I didnt mind it at all!