[MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO] Hello. During this lesson we will go in-depth into the historical media related and cultural characteristics of the first internet and the web. You know that we like analyzing things from the root, from the very starting. This is very important from our perspective, in order to get insight about the real nature of communication on the social networking websites. I will start from the end, defining social media, which will be the core of this week's content. Social media are those new media based on the internet. Therefore, they are interactive media, in which users have a fundamental role in the creation and dissemination of content. In the social media, every user becomes a media. In the 1990s thousands of euros were necessary to create a media company. At the same time, if you wanted to be a broadcaster or to promote a radio station, you had to face many restrictions derived from the scarcity of the radio-electric space, or the control of the government over the creation of audiovisual, radio and television. Those requirements today are not necessary. Social media are open to everyone with internet connection and a computer. Before dealing with the specific issues related to the social media, let me tell you some things about how they were born. Social media are based on the Internet. The Internet was invented in 1969 as a decentralized communication system. It was named ARPANET, Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. In fact, the project was fund by the Advanced Research Projects Agency within the U.S. Department of Defense. What means here Decentralized Communication System? Contrary to the traditional media, which are delivered from a single point in the radio station, TV original broadcasters, to the most mass audiences, all the computers connected to the internet are equal in hierarchy. All of them can deliver information. This architecture represents a shift in comparison with the linear communication paradigm that we explained during the second week. The internet was a fruit of the connection of the ARPANET and other nets that were created during the 1970s, mainly in universities. However, that was long before the internet became into a global communication net between computers and other mobile devices. During many years, the internet was only used by experts on computers, mainly in the university environment. The birth of the World Wide Web was absolutely crucial to transform the internet into mass media utilized by an important part of the population. Why did the world turn the internet into a popular media? First of all, the web was a friendly and easy way of accessing to the internet. The project started in 1989 in a European scientific center, the CERN, based in Switzerland. The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee created the HTML that is the Hypertext Markeup Language, a simple language for writing content for the web. HTML promoted the creation of a browser, a friendly and easy way of accessing the internet, based on the so-called Graphical Interface User. This Graphical Interface User had been created by Xerox Park and was made popular by the Apple computers in the mid-1980s. After launching the first Apple Macintosh, the company led by Bill Gates Microsoft, which dominated the operative system of the great majority of home computers all around the world, adopted the Graphical Interface User. If the Graphical Interface User had turned the computer into a mass, a popular and an easy system of managing computers, the Web made the internet popular. It was the way of adapting the simplicity of the Graphical Interface User to the use of the internet. Another element introduced by the World Wide Web as part of the HTML language was that hypertext, the presence of links, that is, the possibility of connecting and relating one text or another kind of content with other content at infinitum. In fact, as we will see, the logic of connection is one of the core aspects of the online media and social media, where the hyperlinks promote in a dramatic way the connection between content. At the same time, another novelty that introduced the web was its multimedia character. For the first time, the internet allowed to publish easily not only texts, but also photos and video too. This new capability will allow the web to be a new base for the traditional media. In other words, since the mid 1990's an important part of the traditional media considered that they needed present a site on the web. When the Olympic Study Centre of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona CEO-UAB, which in chair, launched its first webpage in 1995, the International Olympic Committee had not created its website, although very quickly their new website was launched. We are going to sum up the characteristics of the web that we have mentioned, to add some new elements afterwards. The World Wide Web created a simple way of accessing the internet adapted for the people who used to manage the graphical interface user, a friendly way of browsing the web. It integrated the hypertext, the hyperlinks that had been created in the mid 1960's by Ted Nelson, but have not been applied to the internet but to some CD-ROMs. The integration of the hyperlinks together with its multimedia capacity allowed the web not only to link one text with another one, but also to link texts with photos and images too. Another aspect that influenced the future development of the World Wide Web and the Internet in general was its open character. That is to say that Tim Berners-Lee conceived the Web as an open and free system of communication. The World Wide Web was not patented. It hasn't got an owner. That is why the creators of content for the web, such as YouTube or Facebook, don't have to pay to Mr. Tim Berners-Lee. The open nature and the capacity of interconnection decisively influenced the development of the net. We wish to highlight that an important novelty was incorporated to the web. It was the concept of site, of digital place. For the first time, the things created were permanently accessible on a place, a site, a virtual place where the published content could be recovered and visited many times, on demand. This concept of virtual place is very significant, because it includes the key concept of diachronicity. Traditionally autovisual media have been synchronic media. In other words, traditional radio and television fundamentally could only be listened and watched live, you could not start again to listen or watch. If is true that you can record radio or television programmes. In this digital world, it is very easy to start to again and browse through a football match or a film for example. Even though, those media were created and conceived as lineal media, independently of the possibilities that the digital world brings us. However, the web content was conceived as content that this permanently available on a site to be watched, read or seen. The web is conceived as diachronic. It is that concept of continuous availability that gives to web a status similar to the ubiquity. In a metaphorical way, the content is in all the places where you have an internet connection. It is not subject to flow of programming, such as television, but always available on the cloud. [BLANK_AUDIO] Therefore, the web is friendly, easy-to-use, and multimedia communication system, which promotes the interconnection of content through the hyperlinks. Interconnection is a key word in this new world of the internet. The web inherited from the first internet a crucial characteristic. Internet hasn't a got a center or periphery. It is all center and periphery at the same time. In other words, there is no central computer which controls it all, as in the case of the traditional media, which we have quickly explained through the old lineal media paradigm. In this old model, the communication flow is controlled by the media, broadcasters, radios and newspapers. The audiences have little possibility to modify or influence the message. The internet and the web are designed as a network of equal computers. [BLANK_AUDIO] This architecture and the characteristics that we have mentioned multimedia, openness, friendly, interconnected, hyperlinks and without center, will condition the applications, services and models of communication that will emerge from it. These characteristics lie in the DNA of the new online applications and the social networking sites. [BLANK_AUDIO]
