Riding the electronic wave

To say that the online revolution is a decade old this year wouldn't be too far wrong. In 1995, the Internet Society of New Zealand was formed to steer local internet development and it continues to do so under its present name, InternetNZ. It came into being 10 years ago in response to growing commercialisation of the internet. Up until that time the internet was a phenomenon known about largely by people within New Zealand universities and research institutes.

How things have changed. A decade on, more than three-quarters of New Zealanders have access to the internet. It has become a vital tool for conducting business and is increasingly relied on as a way of accessing information and services in most areas of life.

Anyone interested in the internet's early history need only look on the internet itself. Long before it became the commercial medium it is today, the internet was the preserve of academics and scientists and computer technicians. If it is taken right back to its origins, it all began more than 40 years ago in the US, when the proposal was first put for a global network of computers. The aim was to create a network that would survive nuclear attack by being able to find alternative routes between computers when parts of the network were disrupted. The network's creators within the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency and American universities invented the internet's various technologies as they went along, and by 1969, the first computers were connected.

If the excitement has so far passed you by, have no fear - there's plenty more to come. The internet is 10 years old as a mass communications medium but relatively young in terms of the technology that delivers it. It is intimately tied up with computers and other digital technologies; they are advancing at such a pace that we're still only glimpsing the possibilities of what the internet of the future will be capable of.

Since the mid-1990s, there has been intense focus on the internet's commercial possibilities. This has coincided with the spread of PCs into most homes and offices; more than half of New Zealand homes have them and it would be a rare business that didn't. In the space of a few years, email (electronic mail) has become an important means of communications within organisations, between organisations and in people's personal lives. The web, meanwhile (short for worldwide web, or what most people mean by the internet), has become established as an indispensable means for organisations to publish information about themselves, which can be made available to anyone with internet access, or limited to only those with the necessary access rights. According to InternetNZ, email is the use most people make of the internet most of the time, followed by web browsing.

That's the internet in very plain terms. The full range of its uses - and potential - is so extensive that countless books and magazines are dedicated to the subject. Some provide reviews of websites of particular kinds of content; some are guides to creating a website of your own; and some detail the merits of different software programs for accessing various kinds of content.

A local example is NetGuide (www.netguide.co.nz), a monthly publication similar to the TV Guide, with website listings and how-to sections describing the internet's latest features - because new capabilities and services are continually being added. NetGuide also sponsors annual awards in which voters support their favourite New Zealand sites and internet services. Internationally outstanding sites, among which New Zealand sites have featured, are recognised in the internet's equivalent of the Academy Awards, the Webbys. Russell Brown, an Auckland journalist who has written extensively about internet issues, has been a Webbys judge.

Brown's online existence goes back to 1994. Today, his most visible online activity is as a blogger, or writer of a web log. Blogs are best described as an online journal to which anyone can subscribe. Brown's, called Hard News, is published at http://publicaddress.net and was a NetGuide best blog finalist last year.

Now a prominent media commentator - he also writes a Listener column and contributes to National Radio's Mediawatch programme - Brown says a striking feature of the internet when he first went online was the sense of having joined a community. "Suddenly you found you had access to these interesting, intelligent people who had something to say and could express it. I still think that culture is in place and has reached its most highly evolved form in the blog world."

The communities the internet creates span the world, bringing together people with common interests. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide routinely access the internet; in New Zealand, the largest internet service provider, Xtra, has about 500,000 subscribers, or half the country's total. The communities they form might consist of an extended family whose dispersed members have access to a website of family photos; internet communities can also be local, such as that which has grown up around the New Zealand Idol TV show; they also frequently have a commercial connection - companies frequently use the internet to provide customers with product information.

"Where you go when you first get online these days is probably a function of who helped you get online and what they've pointed you to, and also whether you have any specialist interest," Brown says. "You might find quite quickly there is some sort of home for you there with like-minded souls."

Businesses of all sorts are putting services online: thousands of people use the internet to do their banking, the most common commercial use New Zealanders make of the internet; thousands more buy and sell goods through online auctions; others order their groceries online; the internet is also a common way of booking holiday travel and accommodation.

Vast amounts of publicly owned information is also making its way online through state and municipal agencies, such as libraries, universities and museums. The government has a large and growing online presence that opens up its inner workings more than ever before. According to Brown, reports and draft bills that can now be found online as a matter of course were 10 years ago only available to a small group of insiders who knew where to obtain them. "Now it's absolutely expected that all this stuff - if possible - will be made available."

Universities, which have been connected to the internet longer than any other users, publish course information and increasingly teach some courses via the internet.

All of these uses of the internet are expanding rapidly. New ones are also developing as the technology underlying the internet, and used for accessing it, becomes more capable. Most New Zealand homes - about 90 per cent - access the internet by relatively slow (dial-up) phone connections. Broadband connections, which typically cost at least twice as much but provide access speeds several times faster, are becoming cheaper. "Broadband means not having to wait for pages to load and being able to access audio and video," says Brown. Once experienced, going back to dial-up is painful.

Most of us today access the internet from a desktop or laptop computer. The spread of fast wireless networks and new portable access devices opens up the possibility of using the internet from anywhere - in a car, for example, to find route information. Live communications via the internet - a cheaper, more feature-rich (with video, for example) alternative to the phone system - will be one of the next uses to catch on.

"As a general rule, one of the biggest things that happens will be something no one counted on," says Brown, pointing to blogging as an example. "The companies that made the software that makes it easier for bloggers were not big; none of the big media companies had a strategy to help people do online journals." Yet blogging has caught on as a grass-roots activity.

The internet revolution is under way. You might not have joined the throng yet but there will be no avoiding it. And there are surprises still to come.