JoJo's Blog- Peek into my Life

WK 6 The Internet Galaxy

Castells’ The Internet Galaxy did succeed in these beginning chapters to bring me to the realization that I was misinformed about hackers. I was under the impression that hackers are what he described as crackers. I always thought that hackers were those to blame for computer viruses. I never had even heard of the term crackers used to refer to the people that are actually the ones being devious. The whole techno-meritocratic culture is new to me. Castells had perfect timing when it came to describing hackers as being “normal” people since at that moment I was thinking about how they are probably loners. Some of my high school peers I am pretty sure can be considered hackers and belong to this culture but before reading this I would not have thought so.
Since my group is writing about the history of internet for the final research paper I did know a little bit about its development. I think it is amazing how so many people especially college students were able to add on their own coding and for the product to be the internet as we know it today. I do not understand how it works but it shows how people can work together and not to sound elementary but share and have so much to show for it. I wonder if more innovations for products came about this way what the outcome would be. It seems limitless. Once again the Leonardo book relates because each person that contributed basically superseded what the other had done before him. Creativity makes progress come a long way.
In Thursday’s class discussion the topic of government’s financial responsibility came was brought up. It is interesting because in my International Relations class that I have prior to SAGES had also discussed the government in terms of how they spend money for projects that may never be necessary. An issue was how the US is contemplating creating some nuclear protection system that would take 15 years to implement and how it would be more feasible to allocate the money on a project that has immediate results. I think these issues relate since the government originally spent so much money to develop on the internet for security measure but the outcome was entirely different. The difference is that everyone benefits even though the government’s original plan failed per se.
Anything related to security usually does get all the necessary money to fund it but now people are a little more hesitant. I am glad the hesitance was not present back then because the world would be an entirely different place. I am sure the internet would have been invented eventually but I wonder how much later. Being that the internet was developed with a security purpose in mind because of the government initiating it, without the governments initial involvement the internet may have developed in stages much different that the ones that took place to get it to how it is now.