Download: The True Story of the Internet

I have been watching Download: The True Story of the Internet on the Science Channel over the last few weeks. Visit the Science Channel’s schedule for the series to see when it will be on next (a marathon of all of the episodes is planned for April 5). The episode titled “People Power” gives some insight into the latest social networking sites and provides some background information (remember Napster, anyone?).

Some video clips are online, but I don’t think they really give you as much as the entire show does. If you can’t watch the shows, though, I would suggest viewing the one about Web 2.0 and the one about YouTube. (I hope those links work.)
It’s an interesting show in general if you like anything “techie.” I’ve found it really fun to learn about the introduction of some sites I use every day and to relive the history of some sites I remember from their beginnings. (My best friend won a Google t-shirt from the site before anyone was using it. She used to read Wired to find the newest stuff. And I’ll admit, I was a member of the Napster generation. I was a freshman in college in 1999, the year it took off.) The host is a “technology journalist” who has firsthand knowledge of the tech industry. Interviews with the founders of many of the sites, from eBay to Google, make this unique.

It would be an interesting collection of videos to add to a public library collection (high school audience or above – or middle schoolers especially interested in technology). It is amazingly up-to-date considering the amount of time it likely took to put everything together. I’m sure there were a few bits that were out-of-date beyond the 1 or 2 I noticed, but overall, they’ve done a good job with it.

The show’s website was a bit slow for me this morning when I was exploring, but I’m pretty sure that was because I was using Mozilla instead of IE (it seemed to work better in internet explorer). However, once you get something to load, it has some interesting details. For example, the Timeline will tell you the exact moment that the World Wide Web was launched – 10 years to the date after I was born, interesting enough – unfortunately it ends in 2003 and doesn’t discuss everything in the shows. The Slideshow has a mug shot of Bill Gates from a 1977 traffic violation arrest as well as a picture of Bill Gates playing Guitar Hero with Slash.

What I really liked about this show was the discussion it sparked between my husband and me. We talked about what we remembered and what was ahead. I think that this might spark some discussion among adults as part of a workshop to increase technology awareness. One thing that we discussed was the tech bubble. When we went to college, everyone was getting jobs easily, but by the time we graduated, we went off to grad school because job prospects were pathetic. Many of the episodes of Download discuss the meteoric rise of sites like Amazon (one of the sites that began the internet bubble) and the crash of the tech industry. I found it fascinating to hear more about what actually happened.

Looking to the future, in the “People Power” episode, they briefly made mention of Facebook going public, which I had never heard about (and for those of you who don’t know, I spent a lot of time last semester reading about Facebook). I decided to do a Google News search for Facebook IPO to see what was going on. I found an interesting Business Week article from March 6 that discusses the wariness of the new Web 2.0 sites to go public because of the recession and the fear of another bubble. (For those of you who were wondering, Facebook was apparently rumored to have plans to go public in 2009, but it has been pushed back to 2010 or later.) Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, noted that companies are being much more cautious than in the past: “In the past, a lot of companies viewed it as their goal to go public. We'll do it when it makes sense for us.” I’m sure a lot of people want to get their hands on a site that has 67 million active users, 45 percent of whom return to the site each day (from Facebook’s statistics site.)

As I read this, I thought that it would be a great lesson for a class studying current business trends, the history of the stock market, or even just to spark discussion about the popularity of the internet today (economics aside). Facebook is still somewhat independent (they had a big deal with Microsoft last year), while MySpace, another popular social networking site, was snagged by Murdoch’s News Corp in 2005. Students could discuss their personal habits online, survey friends, etc. They could do research about the financial history of the sites and other websites. Concerns about privacy and predators are always at the top of the list when discussing these sites, but students might appreciate learning more about them or finally hearing from an adult about something other than the dangers of the sites. (I’m not saying you shouldn’t mention these things, but that you shouldn’t make them the center of every conversation.) Now, I’m not a teacher, so maybe this isn’t possible in school, especially since so many schools ban the sites, but it is interesting to explore and discuss. Part of media literacy is understanding who owns what company, who owns the information we put out there on the internet, and what rights we have to use that information.