Professor Janet Abbate’s Inventing the Internet is a foundational work in the study of the internet. Precisely because it is a foundational work, looking back from two decades later at this book—published at the height of the internet bubble—one inevitably feels compelled to test Professor Abbate’s views against a contemporary perspective. Nonetheless, this pioneering analytical framework has cast a long shadow, influencing many subsequent works, including Professor Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture.
1. Military Technology and the Birth of the Internet
Military requirements provided the initial impetus, substantial financial support, and, most importantly, a clearly defined problem to be solved. These factors motivated civilian forces to participate, who in turn brought their own cultural values into the process. The academic culture of openness, decentralization, and the “open exchange of information” was thus integrated into the internet’s initial development.
In the 1960s, to address the nuclear anxiety of the Cold War, the U.S. Department of Defense sought a “survivable” command and control communications system. Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation proposed the concepts of “distributed communications” and “packet switching”. This became the internet’s earliest conceptual origin.
By the late 1960s, the establishment of ARPANET transcended the problem of nuclear survivability, focusing more on economic and efficiency issues. The primary goal was to solve the problem of “resource sharing” among the various incompatible computers sponsored by ARPA. To this end, ARPA recruited and attracted a large number of non-military and non-governmental researchers, primarily elite research experts from various universities.
These elite experts brought with them the open and cooperative culture of academia, infusing it into the design of ARPANET. This created immense tension with traditional military modes of use and management.
Evidently, ARPANET failed in solving its primary problem; controlling and using other computing resources proved difficult. However, these elite researchers proactively invented an innovative function: email. This was a bottom-up innovation, a “user-driven” innovation led by elite users to meet their own needs. This was clearly not an objective ARPA had anticipated .
But in the late 1970s, the military rediscovered the value of email and began to actively use ARPA for information transmission. However, using ARPANET for this purpose required the “interoperation” of various tactical networks, such as the packet radio network (PRNET) and the satellite network (SATNET). Consequently, the military developed new requirements based on ARPANET, and to solve this problem, a design led by Kahn and Cerf produced the TCP/IP protocol.
The design process for TCP/IP involved multi-level cooperation with British and French researchers, making it an international research achievement. It was for this reason that openness was fully considered during its design. When combined with the military needs for “robustness” and interoperability, it became a protocol with multiple attributes and characteristics.
As ARPANET matured, its management was transferred to the Defense Communications Agency (DCA). The DCA strengthened control, attempting to upgrade ARPANET using military methods—specifically, by enforcing the transition to the more robust and secure TCP/IP protocol. However, the civilian need for openness and freedom created an irreconcilable conflict with this objective. Ultimately, the military spun off its independent network (MILNET), while civilian and university researchers continued to use ARPANET.
Finally, this ARPANET, having completely shed its mandatory military security attributes, became the darling of the civilian world. After the National Science Foundation (NSF) took over, it ushered in an explosive era of academic and commercial growth. The emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW) once again demonstrated a bottom-up innovation that leveraged the internet’s open and flexible architecture, completing another “re-invention” of the internet.
The Active Translation of Technocrats
In Professor Janet Abbate’s narrative, technocrats are not depicted as rigid administrative leaders who obstruct innovation. On the contrary, they are typically project managers with strong technical backgrounds. They possess a keen problem-solving awareness and become key figures in managing progress and weighing trade-offs. This involves a critical “translation”: how technocrats convert high-level objectives into concrete engineering projects. An interesting point is how Robert Taylor and Larry Roberts needed to explain their project’s purpose to the DoD and Congress. They had to “translate” complex, abstract academic philosophies into practical rhetoric that the military could understand (e.g., as a cost-saving measure), all while hoping to secure maximum autonomy and avoid interference from traditional military bureaucracy.
In this process, they also acquired significant political capital. The 1972 ARPANET demonstration at the ICCC became a major political symbol, a “watershed event” that earned Larry Roberts enormous prestige, which in turn helped them secure more resources to push for more projects.
Robert Kahn also leveraged his position to push the DoD (DCA) to adopt TCP/IP as a military standard, transforming this technology into institutional power.
Elites Among the Commoners
We must acknowledge that even if the process was filled with civilian, bottom-up innovation, nearly every actor in the entire history of the internet’s invention was, objectively, an elite—specifically, well-educated white males of a certain social standing. They are not “bottom-up” in a truly populist sense. While they were indeed “commoners” and acted as “users” relative to the military, which controlled vast power and funds, they remained preeminent elites. This is not intended as a critique but rather as an observation of a universal characteristic of the early users of a technology.
It is precisely because of this elite perspective, coupled with an optimistic internet narrative, that the book implies the internet’s openness, inclusivity, equality, and democracy would become a dominant social narrative for the future. However, the rise of internet giants over the last decade has pushed reality in another direction.
The increasing participation of the masses in the internet does not necessarily bring fairness and democracy. The original traits of openness, inclusivity, and exchange resonated among those who already possessed them (i.e., the early elite users). As more diverse populations began using the internet, these traits did not translate into democracy and progress, but instead, in some areas, manifested as polarization and a degradation of discourse.
This inevitably leads me to wonder: Was this “open” characteristic inherent in the internet technology itself, or was it a characteristic of the early users that was subsequently mythologized as a feature of the internet? Once this internet myth is punctured, the remaining technological features cannot, on their own, sufficiently or proactively influence society. From this perspective, the claim of the Toronto School that “the medium is the message” is, perhaps, once again called into question.
The Relationship Between Media and the Internet
At its inception, the internet served the purpose of information exchange; email was its most fitting application. From this viewpoint, the internet was an optimization of traditional analog information transfer. It was not until the arrival of the World Wide Web that it truly became a “mass medium” . Therefore, both of these transformations were “users’ re-invention”. This is one of Professor Janet Abbate’s most important arguments.
The internet never intended to replace traditional media. On the contrary, its media function was a mass re-invention—a decentralized, bottom-up service originally intended for research use. It was only in the 1990s, with the explosive growth of the internet and the WWW, that it truly became a “public communications medium”.