The emergence of web 2.0 in the first decade of the twenty-first century was itself a revolution in the short history of the Internet, fostering the rise of social media and other interactive, crowd-based communication tools. The Internet underwent immense growth it was no longer a state-controlled project, but the largest computer network in the world, comprising over 50,000 sub-networks, 4 million systems, and 70 million users. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Internet widened in scope to encompass the IT capabilities of universities and research centers, and, later on, public entities, institutions, and private enterprises from around the world. Today, however, immense quantities of information are uploaded and downloaded over this electronic leviathan, and the content is very much our own, for now we are all commentators, publishers, and creators. In its early days-which from a historical perspective are still relatively recent-it was a static network designed to shuttle a small freight of bytes or a short message between two terminals it was a repository of information where content was published and maintained only by expert coders. The Internet itself has been transformed. But today a click or two is enough to read your local paper and any news source from anywhere in the world, updated up to the minute. Before the Internet, if you wanted to keep up with the news, you had to walk down to the newsstand when it opened in the morning and buy a local edition reporting what had happened the previous day.
Ordering a pizza, buying a television, sharing a moment with a friend, sending a picture over instant messaging. In almost everything we do, we use the Internet. It has revolutionized communications, to the extent that it is now our preferred medium of everyday communication. The Internet has turned our existence upside down.
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