What Hath the Internet Wrought?
SCI3-5a-Mon2
Carl Lazarus
This course will take place in person at 60 Turner Street. The room will be equipped with a HEPA air purifier.
September 9 - October 7
In a 1997 interview Bill Gates predicted the Internet would help consumers find things they couldn’t have found before and get better prices. He also said that the Internet was early in its evolution, that there was a need for wireless devices and tablets, that “people aren’t incorporating it into their lifestyles but they will.” All these things have come to pass, but also much more - both good and bad. Perhaps he and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, foresaw accelerating globalization. They did not anticipate cybercrime, cyber-bullying and cyber warfare, nor did they foresee that the ability to spread information rapidly would also mean the ability to spread misinformation just as fast. In retrospect, it is like most technology advances, enabling good and bad, helping some and hurting others.
We will look at various ways in which the Internet and the World Wide Web have changed our lives for the better and for the worse. The evolution and effects of e-commerce, social media, online media and data in “the cloud,” the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the thorny issues around false or hate speech and privacy will be subjects of our investigation. There will be some discussion of enabling technologies, but this is not a particularly technical course. The course will continue where “From Sputnik to the World Wide Web: the Creation of the Internet” left off, but the prior course is not a prerequisite.
Roughly the same amount of lecture and discussion.
All materials will be provided on a class website or by email links.
1-2 hours per week.
Carl Lazarus has been a BOLLI member since 2013 and has led a variety of BOLLI courses since 2015. He studied chemistry at Yale and biochemistry at Brandeis, but subsequently studied computer science at MIT and made his career in information technology. He wrote software and managed software development for the healthcare industry, and later managed various online services.