The Internet: Difference between revisions

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~~Early twentieth-century writers did not foresee packet-switching or Wi-Fi, but several of them sketched intellectual architectures that resemble today’s internet~~. ~~Their ideas circulated for decades and helped shape later technical and cultural projects~~.

''Written by AI. Help improve this answer by adding to the sources section. When the sources section is updated this article will regenerate.''

The ~~key strands~~

Early ideas about a global information network did not appear suddenly with the arrival of computers; they grew out of a decades-long conversation among scientists, writers, theologians and engineers. The sources listed above record some of the most explicit forecasts, each framed by the intellectual concerns of its time.

* Vannevar Bush’s “Memex” (1945) – an electromechanical desk with microfilm, associative links, and sharing functions. Bush imagined scholars “conjointly” creating trails of knowledge and sending them to one another, thereby forming “an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory” [1].

=== Key anticipations ===

* H. G. Wells’s “World Encyclopaedia” (1938) – a continually updated, universally accessible repository that any knowledgeable person could help curate. Wells called it a “mental clearing house” that would “link all minds” and strengthen world peace [2].

* Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noosphere” (1920s–1950s) – a planetary layer of thought produced when human minds interconnect and share information. Teilhard spoke of “a sort of ‘planetary mind’” that would arise once “each individual becomes a center of a system of instantaneous communications” [3].

* David Ronfeldt’s historical synthesis (2020) – reviews these earlier notions, noting how each supplied “precursors to the internet and to today’s concepts of collective intelligence” [4].

~~Where they agree –~~ and ~~differ~~

* H. G. Wells’ “World Brain” (1938) imagined “a complete planetary memory” that would be “constantly edited and brought up to date” and made available to every citizen through microfilm reading rooms. Wells saw this as a way to create an informed world public opinion capable of preventing war [2].

~~Agreement~~

* Vannevar Bush’s essay “As We May Think” (1945) proposed the Memex, a desk-sized device using microfilm and electronics that would let an individual build “associative trails” through documents. Bush’s mechanism pre-figured both hypertext links and personal workstations [1].

* ~~All three primary authors assumed~~ that ~~better communication technology~~ would ~~knit humanity into a single, knowledge-sharing web~~.

* They each framed the project as a public good rather than a commercial product.

~~Differences~~

* Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (written 1930s-1940s, published 1955) advanced the spiritual-evolutionary concept of the noosphere – a “thinking layer” of the planet that would eventually knit all minds together by means of technology and communication [3].

* ~~Bush stayed closest to engineering reality~~, ~~describing specific hardware; Wells emphasized institutional governance and librarianship; Teilhard cast~~ the ~~idea in~~ evolutionary ~~and spiritual terms.~~

* Bush worried about information overload and stressed personal control; Wells focused on expert curation; Teilhard celebrated an inevitable convergence of minds.

~~Conflicting perspectives~~

* Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of All Demos” showed how several of these ideas could work in practice: real-time text editing, hypertext linking, screen sharing and pointing devices. Engelbart explicitly cited Bush as an inspiration and spoke of augmenting the collective intellect of mankind [5].

~~Ronfeldt observes that Wells distrusted centralized propaganda whereas Teilhard saw convergence~~ as an ~~almost mystical destiny; thus they disagreed on whether~~ the ~~new medium should be tightly managed by experts (Wells) or would self-organize (Teilhard)~~ [4].

~~Public discourse over time~~

* Later syntheses, such as Ronfeldt’s survey of noosphere thinking (2020), trace how these pre-digital visions informed the design goals of ARPANET, the Internet and today’s collaborative platforms, while also noting tensions between centralized “world library” models (Wells) and decentralized network ideals (Bush, Engelbart) [4].

~~1930–1938: Wells publishes articles and then~~ the ~~book “World Brain”, giving radio talks and lectures at universities and PEN meetings. Librarians debate feasibility; some fear a monopoly of knowledge [2].~~

=== Timeline of the discourse ===

~~1945: Bush’s “As We May Think” appears~~ in ~~The Atlantic. It is widely reprinted; Life magazine illustrates~~ the ~~Memex, stirring excitement among scientists returning from WWII~~ [1].

1934–1938 | Wells publishes articles and lectures that become “World Brain”, stirring debate in the British press about whether a universal encyclopedia would empower citizens or impose cultural uniformity [2].

~~1950s: Teilhard’s writings circulate privately (he was barred~~ from ~~publishing by his Jesuit superiors); after his death the English translation of “The Phenomenon of Man” (1959) triggers discussion among theologians and cyberneticians about a “thinking earth”~~ [3].

July 1945 | Bush’s essay appears in The Atlantic. Scientists emerging from wartime work discuss how Memex-like tools could keep exploding research literatures manageable [1].

~~1960s–1970s: ARPANET designers cite Bush explicitly; Wells~~ and ~~Teilhard~~ are ~~referenced mostly in humanities circles~~. ~~The term “noosphere” begins to appear in ecological and New Age literature.~~

late 1940s-1950s | Teilhard’s writings circulate among intellectuals and are placed on the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books even as secular thinkers admire his technological optimism [3].

~~1980s–1990s: Popularizers such as Stewart Brand~~ and ~~Timothy Leary juxtapose Teilhard’s noosphere with the emerging internet;~~ librarians ~~recall~~ Wells ~~during debates on~~ the ~~“digital library”~~.

1950s-early 1960s | Information scientists and librarians cite both Bush and Wells while exploring machine searchable catalogs; the term “hypertext” is coined by Ted Nelson (not in the sources) who points directly to Bush’s associative trails [1][4].

~~2000s–2020: Scholars like Ronfeldt reassess all three~~ authors ~~as “proto-internet” thinkers, noting both their prescience and their blind spots concerning commercialization, inequality, and surveillance~~ [4].

Dec 1968 | Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” shocks the computing community and showcases concrete tools for the collective knowledge work envisioned by earlier authors [5].

~~How accurately did they “predict”~~ the ~~internet?~~

1970s-1990s | ARPANET, then the Internet, implements packet-switched, decentralized architecture that aligns more with Bush/Engelbart than with Wells’s central encyclopedia, while popular writers revive Teilhard’s noosphere as a metaphor for cyberspace [4].

* Conceptual accuracy: They correctly anticipated hyperlinking (Bush), ~~crowdsourced encyclopedias (~~Wells), and ~~global real-time connectivity (~~Teilhard).

2000s-present | Scholars such as Ronfeldt reassess these predictions, noting that social media and wikis realise many technical details yet raise new governance issues that Wells and Teilhard anticipated in moral or spiritual terms [4].

* Technical specifics: None foresaw packet switching, layered protocols, or ~~the economics of digital advertising.~~

* Social dynamics: Their forecasts were largely utopian; the darker possibilities of disinformation, corporate monopolies, and state surveillance received little attention (Wells touched on propaganda but still assumed benevolent oversight).

~~Legacy~~

=== Converging and conflicting views ===

~~Memex inspired hypertext pioneers like Ted Nelson~~ and ~~Douglas~~ Engelbart~~; World Brain is often credited as a spiritual ancestor~~ of ~~Wikipedia;~~ the ~~noosphere remains a touchstone in discussions of collective intelligence and planetary computing~~ [1][2][3][4].

* Centralization vs. decentralization: Wells favoured an authoritative, curated repository, whereas Bush and Engelbart stressed individually created, loosely linked knowledge trails. Ronfeldt argues that today’s Internet has elements of both, but its open architecture owes more to the Bush–Engelbart line [2][1][5][4].

~~— Written by WikleBot~~. ~~Help improve this answer by adding~~ to the ~~sources below~~.

* Purpose: For Wells the goal was peace through common information; for Bush it was scientific productivity; for Teilhard it was spiritual evolution toward an “Omega Point.” These differing motives shaped how each thinker pictured governance and access [2][1][3].

* Spiritual dimension: Teilhard’s explicitly theological noosphere was controversial, prompting both admiration and ecclesiastical censure. Later secular writers borrowed the term while dropping its Christian eschatology [3][4].

=== Influence on the eventual Internet ===

Though none of the early thinkers foresaw packet switching or TCP/IP, their conceptual frameworks directly influenced the designers of hypertext, personal computers and collaborative software. Engelbart’s team kept a copy of Bush’s essay pinned to the lab wall, and the term “augmented intelligence” remains a guiding principle in human-computer interaction research [1][5]. Meanwhile, the aspiration for a shared planetary knowledge space continues to echo Wells and Teilhard, now embodied in projects such as Wikipedia and global open data networks [2][3][4].

In sum, the Internet emerged at the intersection of technical invention and a long public conversation about how humanity might pool its knowledge. By tracing that conversation we see that what now feels inevitable was once only an audacious idea in the minds of earlier visionaries.

== Sources ==

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-Early twentieth-century writers did not foresee packet-switching or Wi-Fi, but several of them sketched intellectual architectures that resemble today’s internet. Their ideas circulated for decades and helped shape later technical and cultural projects.
+''Written by AI. Help improve this answer by adding to the sources section. When the sources section is updated this article will regenerate.''
-The key strands
+Early ideas about a global information network did not appear suddenly with the arrival of computers; they grew out of a decades-long conversation among scientists, writers, theologians and engineers.  The sources listed above record some of the most explicit forecasts, each framed by the intellectual concerns of its time.
-* Vannevar Bush’s “Memex” (1945) – an electromechanical desk with microfilm, associative links, and sharing functions. Bush imagined scholars “conjointly” creating trails of knowledge and sending them to one another, thereby forming “an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory” [1].
+=== Key anticipations ===
-* H. G. Wells’s “World Encyclopaedia” (1938) – a continually updated, universally accessible repository that any knowledgeable person could help curate. Wells called it a “mental clearing house” that would “link all minds” and strengthen world peace [2].
-* Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noosphere” (1920s–1950s) – a planetary layer of thought produced when human minds interconnect and share information. Teilhard spoke of “a sort of ‘planetary mind’” that would arise once “each individual becomes a center of a system of instantaneous communications” [3].
-* David Ronfeldt’s historical synthesis (2020) – reviews these earlier notions, noting how each supplied “precursors to the internet and to today’s concepts of collective intelligence” [4].
-Where they agree – and differ
+* H. G. Wells’ “World Brain” (1938) imagined “a complete planetary memory” that would be “constantly edited and brought up to date” and made available to every citizen through microfilm reading rooms.  Wells saw this as a way to create an informed world public opinion capable of preventing war [2].
-Agreement
+* Vannevar Bush’s essay “As We May Think” (1945) proposed the Memex, a desk-sized device using microfilm and electronics that would let an individual build “associative trails” through documents.  Bush’s mechanism pre-figured both hypertext links and personal workstations [1].
-* All three primary authors assumed that better communication technology would knit humanity into a single, knowledge-sharing web.
-* They each framed the project as a public good rather than a commercial product.
-Differences
+* Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (written 1930s-1940s, published 1955) advanced the spiritual-evolutionary concept of the noosphere – a “thinking layer” of the planet that would eventually knit all minds together by means of technology and communication [3].
-* Bush stayed closest to engineering reality, describing specific hardware; Wells emphasized institutional governance and librarianship; Teilhard cast the idea in evolutionary and spiritual terms.
-* Bush worried about information overload and stressed personal control; Wells focused on expert curation; Teilhard celebrated an inevitable convergence of minds.
-Conflicting perspectives
+* Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of All Demos” showed how several of these ideas could work in practice: real-time text editing, hypertext linking, screen sharing and pointing devices.  Engelbart explicitly cited Bush as an inspiration and spoke of augmenting the collective intellect of mankind [5].
-Ronfeldt observes that Wells distrusted centralized propaganda whereas Teilhard saw convergence as an almost mystical destiny; thus they disagreed on whether the new medium should be tightly managed by experts (Wells) or would self-organize (Teilhard) [4].
-Public discourse over time
+* Later syntheses, such as Ronfeldt’s survey of noosphere thinking (2020), trace how these pre-digital visions informed the design goals of ARPANET, the Internet and today’s collaborative platforms, while also noting tensions between centralized “world library” models (Wells) and decentralized network ideals (Bush, Engelbart) [4].
-–1938: Wells publishes articles and then the book “World Brain”, giving radio talks and lectures at universities and PEN meetings. Librarians debate feasibility; some fear a monopoly of knowledge [2].
+=== Timeline of the discourse ===
-: Bush’s “As We May Think” appears in The Atlantic. It is widely reprinted; Life magazine illustrates the Memex, stirring excitement among scientists returning from WWII [1].
+–1938 | Wells publishes articles and lectures that become “World Brain”, stirring debate in the British press about whether a universal encyclopedia would empower citizens or impose cultural uniformity [2].
-s: Teilhard’s writings circulate privately (he was barred from publishing by his Jesuit superiors); after his death the English translation of “The Phenomenon of Man” (1959) triggers discussion among theologians and cyberneticians about a “thinking earth” [3].
+July 1945 | Bush’s essay appears in The Atlantic.  Scientists emerging from wartime work discuss how Memex-like tools could keep exploding research literatures manageable [1].
-s–1970s: ARPANET designers cite Bush explicitly; Wells and Teilhard are referenced mostly in humanities circles. The term “noosphere” begins to appear in ecological and New Age literature.
+late 1940s-1950s | Teilhard’s writings circulate among intellectuals and are placed on the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books even as secular thinkers admire his technological optimism [3].
-s–1990s: Popularizers such as Stewart Brand and Timothy Leary juxtapose Teilhard’s noosphere with the emerging internet; librarians recall Wells during debates on the “digital library”.
+s-early 1960s | Information scientists and librarians cite both Bush and Wells while exploring machine searchable catalogs; the term “hypertext” is coined by Ted Nelson (not in the sources) who points directly to Bush’s associative trails [1][4].
-s–2020: Scholars like Ronfeldt reassess all three authors as “proto-internet” thinkers, noting both their prescience and their blind spots concerning commercialization, inequality, and surveillance [4].
+Dec 1968 | Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” shocks the computing community and showcases concrete tools for the collective knowledge work envisioned by earlier authors [5].
-How accurately did they “predict” the internet?
+s-1990s | ARPANET, then the Internet, implements packet-switched, decentralized architecture that aligns more with Bush/Engelbart than with Wells’s central encyclopedia, while popular writers revive Teilhard’s noosphere as a metaphor for cyberspace [4].
-* Conceptual accuracy: They correctly anticipated hyperlinking (Bush), crowdsourced encyclopedias (Wells), and global real-time connectivity (Teilhard).
+s-present | Scholars such as Ronfeldt reassess these predictions, noting that social media and wikis realise many technical details yet raise new governance issues that Wells and Teilhard anticipated in moral or spiritual terms [4].
-* Technical specifics: None foresaw packet switching, layered protocols, or the economics of digital advertising.
-* Social dynamics: Their forecasts were largely utopian; the darker possibilities of disinformation, corporate monopolies, and state surveillance received little attention (Wells touched on propaganda but still assumed benevolent oversight).
-Legacy
+=== Converging and conflicting views ===
-Memex inspired hypertext pioneers like Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart; World Brain is often credited as a spiritual ancestor of Wikipedia; the noosphere remains a touchstone in discussions of collective intelligence and planetary computing [1][2][3][4].
+* Centralization vs. decentralization: Wells favoured an authoritative, curated repository, whereas Bush and Engelbart stressed individually created, loosely linked knowledge trails.  Ronfeldt argues that today’s Internet has elements of both, but its open architecture owes more to the Bush–Engelbart line [2][1][5][4].
-— Written by WikleBot. Help improve this answer by adding to the sources below.
+* Purpose: For Wells the goal was peace through common information; for Bush it was scientific productivity; for Teilhard it was spiritual evolution toward an “Omega Point.”  These differing motives shaped how each thinker pictured governance and access [2][1][3].
+* Spiritual dimension: Teilhard’s explicitly theological noosphere was controversial, prompting both admiration and ecclesiastical censure.  Later secular writers borrowed the term while dropping its Christian eschatology [3][4].
+=== Influence on the eventual Internet ===
+Though none of the early thinkers foresaw packet switching or TCP/IP, their conceptual frameworks directly influenced the designers of hypertext, personal computers and collaborative software.  Engelbart’s team kept a copy of Bush’s essay pinned to the lab wall, and the term “augmented intelligence” remains a guiding principle in human-computer interaction research [1][5].  Meanwhile, the aspiration for a shared planetary knowledge space continues to echo Wells and Teilhard, now embodied in projects such as Wikipedia and global open data networks [2][3][4].
+In sum, the Internet emerged at the intersection of technical invention and a long public conversation about how humanity might pool its knowledge.  By tracing that conversation we see that what now feels inevitable was once only an audacious idea in the minds of earlier visionaries.
 == Sources ==