Historical Overview of the Internet

The history of the Internet is elusive due to the vast amount of information that has flooded it since the beginning. The internet was originally not so much a diffusion of ideas, but more a spontaneous and international explosion of inter-networking inside and between governments, businesses, and universities around the world. Widely accepted to be the first form of an infant internet that eventually led to its commercial use would be the development of ARPANET, which began in 1969 with a connection between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute. Through the next 20 years, the precursor to modern day internet came in multiple shapes and forms, from NSFNet to MILNET, which paved the way to commercial use. In 1989 the first American commercial internet company providing public access to the internet was created in Massachusetts, allowing for the creation of modern internet use (www.wikipedia.com).
The first signs of sexual content on the internet has been traced to the 1980's in the form of ASCII, a type of art created by the use of a keyboard. In the early 90's porn was widely distributed with the use of newsgroups similar to discussion boards, where anonymous users would scan and upload pornographic images. Since the early 90's, the pornographic internet community has grown to an innumerable amount with no signs of slowing down(www.salon.com).
Originally the internet was male dominated due to majority of males working on its creation. Since it's availability to the public, the internet has seen a great amount of changes. Internet Journalist Joanna Glasner especially notes the gradual changes seen between two early internet sites, men.com, and women.com. She demonstrates that in the beginning, these two websites focused on specifics about being a male or female. Women.com would feature things like shopping, fashion, makeup, and fitness, while men.com often featured pornography. In recent findings on these two websites, we see more "PG" rated material and the subjects of both sites have merged somewhat to contain similar articles on fitness and entertainment. This pattern of conglomerating polar gender sites has emerged over the past 15 years and one could speculate that the increased presence of females on the internet could have led to this "emasculating" of male websites such as men.com and the creation of a more well rounded and less biased internet (www.wired.com).
Some journalists and studies have even shown that women will possibly outnumber men in the future of internet use. In 2005, The Pew Internet & American Life Project conducted a survey which found that under the age of 65, women outnumber men in the use of the internet. They note that within the 18-29 age bracket, women outnumber men by 6 percent. With African American statistics, the study revealed that women outnumber men by 10 percent. The possibility of this trend continuing could lead to a further equality between men and women (www.pewinternet.org).
-Joshua Winn