People and the Internet - The Shift To High-tech Entertainment, Who Uses The Internet: By Race, Who Uses The Internet? By Age

In December 1969, ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) went online, connecting four major universities. It was for research, education, and government purposes, and provided a communications network in the event of a national emergency. This research and communications network would soon be known as the Internet.

As the technology became more advanced, the system rapidly developed. According to the Internet Society, the earliest e-mail was introduced in 1972; domain names such as.com and.edu appeared in 1984; the term "World Wide Web" appeared about 1989; commerce sites were established around 1994. With the good comes the bad, however: for all those pesky marketing e-mails, we coined the term "spamming" in the same year.

The Internet is now reference tool and entertainment device. We play games, send photos to Grandma, order the latest bestsellers, try on new identities in chatrooms and do research for the big report due on Monday. This chapter offers some insight into this technology that has so changed our lives.

The first panels in this chapter offer an overview of the Internet. Searching the Internet clearly has become one of our favorite leisure activities, while others (reading) have paid a price. Other panels will address the basic question: who is using the Internet? Recent data dispel the myth that the World Wide Web is just for the young and affluent.

Final panels in this chapter address some of the highlights of the Web: auctions, online term searching and online dating (a different kind of searching altogether). These panels are slightly lighter in tone. We'll look at the most popular search terms to see what they reveal about our interests and habits. We'll look at the phenomenon of eBay auctions. We'll also look at online personals and dating to see if this technology helps us find true love.