Searching the word Internet

Searching for the word internet was not as easy task as I thought I would. When I first looked it up in the historical journals I kept getting a lot of results as early as the early 1800's but I most of the terms being found were actually interest or interpret. After looked through countless articles and classified ads, I finally found a small 1986 clipping from the Chicago Tribune and it was talking about the financial standings of a banking computer service supplier. Other articles that I found around this time were also about the financial status of computer service providers or the status of computers and internet access but they mostly focused on banking.

I then looked in the other scholarly databases. On Project Muse I found an interesting article called Internet Life, African Art from 1994. It was actually a piece about the arguments that still go on today about the value of the internet and content people find on it. The author, Denis Dutton , writes, "considering how often we're disappointed by books from reputable publishers, it's not surprising what the mind can look like on the Internet, a virtually free, unedited medium," (424). I thought this was very interesting because we truly are having the same conversations Dutton brought up almost 20 years ago. On ProQuest I found a Dec 1981 article that talked about the company 3Com.What I found most interesting about this article was the first line that said the company mentioned was the only one at the time selling hardware and software components for building an Ethernet local network. I really thought this was interesting because I'm sure now there are countless companies that would provide this service/ product.

History of the term "Blogosphere"

When researching "blogosphere" on the three newspaper databases, I was unable to find any material on either the Chicago Tribune or The Los Angeles Times databases. However, I did find an interesting article on the New York Times database from May 5, 2002 entitled "At Large in the Blogosphere" by Judith Schulevitz. The article details the definition of a blog, what doesn't constitute a blog and what to watch out for when logging into the blogosphere. The discussion seems somewhat rudimentary and primitive; blogs, or "weblogs" as they were originally called, were viewed as a source of informal journalism and information acquisition. In an article from JStor, "Toward an Open-Source Methodology: What We Can Learn from the Blogosphere" calls upon political pundits utilizing the Internet to download political data during the 2004 presidential election. An abstract found on Project MUSE dated from 2005 brings up the concept of implementing blogging to college classrooms as a possibility to revolutionize learning.

What's intriguing about these articles is their progression. As time has gone on, and digital communication has evolved, the purpose of the blogosphere has become less focused on blogging for informational purposes, and more on communicating with others on specific interests and forums.

Today's blogosphere, it could be said, strikes a different chord. Rather than providing information and sharing different perspectives on relevant world affairs (which they definitely do, but not as much as initially predicted to occur, most likely), the blogosphere is viewed as a place of casual, more leisure-oriented activity centered on common interests. Oddly enough, this is exactly what Schulevitz claims is not an element of the blogosphere; "the super-personalized filters that social critics fretted would splinter the nation into a million tiny interest groups." Blogging sites like Tumblr and this one, Blogger, are geared toward allowing users to collaborate and share their own generated content, and interact with others over other self-generated content. 

It is possible that as the Internet has evolved over the last eleven years, there are now more options than ever to both write for informational purposes and to share common interests and opinions.

History of the Term "Laptop"

For my search, I decided on the term "laptop," which is something many of us use everyday and is very important to me personally in my everyday work. I began my search in the New York Times. The earliest use I was able to find was from November 5, 1985 in an article entitled "Big Gains in a Laptop, For a Price," by Peter H. Lewis. At the time this article was written, laptops were a fairly new technology, and improvements were constantly being worked on (as they are today). This particular article describes two different laptops models and how their technological components differ from one another, as well as comparisons in price. Moving on to the Chicago Tribune, the earliest use of the term "laptop" that I could find was November 16, 1984 in Christine Winter's article "'Laptop' Computers, Software Steal Show." Where she discusses new laptop models and software (both of which were on the rise in terms of popularity) that were present at a technology convention. The earliest use of the term that I was able to find in the Los Angeles Times was from June 9, 1986, in Richard O'Reilly's article "Computer File: Toshiba's and IBM's New Laptop PCs are both Attractive Compromises." In this article, O'Reilly discusses new laptops that were being offered by the Toshiba and IBM brands. All of these uses seemed to be from when laptop's were seeing a rise in popularity early in their development and were just beginning to become known to the public.

In my ProQuest Search, the earliest use of the term "laptop" that I was able to find was in an article from April 7, 1986 in Focus: Metropolitan Philadelphia's Business Newsmagazine. This article discusses IBM announcing a new laptop computer as pat of its product lineup, describing some of its specs. It is interesting to read, as some of the laptop characteristics that were praised back in 1986 would be laughed at by today's standards. From small memory capacity compared to today to the laptop's weight being "less than 13 pounds," all for the same price as a very high-quality laptop today, it is interesting to see how technology has developed over time. Searching Project Muse, the earliest use of the term "laptop" that I was able to find was from "Working on the Clinton Administration's Health Care Reform Task Force" by Nancy Neveloff Dubler in December of 1993. This simply made a passing reference to the use of laptops to do work, though many people also carried a disk with the necessary files and used an on-site computer instead of carrying around their own laptops. When I did a search on JSTOR, the earliest instance of the term "laptop" was in "BioScience," published by the University of California Press in November of 1987. It occurred in a short section on page 700 entitled "Computers to Go." This was a brief response to an earlier mention in "Bioscience" of laptop manufacturers, stating that they in fact left out the what they author refers to as "the company that started it all."

In my search, I did not find any major differences from how we use the term "laptop" today. Each article used the term in reference to laptop computers and all of the articles I found were from some point in the 1980s, when laptops had just started to gain popularity in the public and had recently seen increases in public use. the most interesting thing to note is the advancements that have taken place over the years. Many of the articles I found contained images of old laptops as well as details of their specifications. Many of the traits would be laughed at today and considered simplistic at best. Memory capacities were small and weights were obscene compared to laptops today. In addition, the programs that laptops used then were far more limited in their functionality than laptops are today. the most interesting thing about this search was to simply see how far technology has come and get an idea of the major advancements that have taken place. In a relatively short amount of time, we have managed to make incredible technological leaps and bounds.

History of the Term "Search Engine"

When trying to find the earliest journalistic use of the term "search engine", I didn't see anything scanning the Los Angeles Times archives. Luckily enough, I found one article in the Chicago Tribune dating back to 1988 that talked about how CD-ROMS used search engines only programed to their software. This meant that there was not a universal, cross-system search engine at the time. However, the article does say that hypertext is a search engine that developers should consider. In The New York Times, the earliest article I could find was from 1996. Titled "New Internet Search Engine Said to Ease Hunt for Sites", the article introduces a new search engine called HotBot that was supposed to be better than Yahoo and Alta Vista. Clearly, HotBot didn't pan out as planned.

Using ProQuest, the earliest date I could find was from InfoWorld in late 1995 to early 1996,  where a new search engine by the name of Verity was discussed. This engine was said to include "the capability to automatically cluster retrieved documents according to their contents. The Project MUSE link was not working for me, so I did not find anything. With JSTOR, I was able to find my oldest article yet, dating all the way back to Fall 1987. It discusses the possibility of high-speed search engines for archive systems, much like the ones I'm using for this blog post.

After going over all the results, the definition of a search engine relatively means the same thing today as it did as its inception. However, in today's world, it is important to look at the algorithms in place that define a search such as PageRank, location, and search history. It was very interesting to see the search engines discussed in early articles such as HotBot because they clearly are not relevant anymore. Also, it's funny how I was using search engines in order to research search engines. My thoughts.

History of the term Facebook

First, I searched for Facebook in the New York Times. It took me to an article from 2005 with a headline "Facebook.com Goes to High School" written by Ellen Rosen. At the time it was written, the site had only been in existence for one year. The article is critical of the social networking platform's tendency to lure teens on to the Internet. Initially founder Mark Zuckerberg wanted to ensure that adults did not have the ability to join, so college students (with their school-driven e-mail addresses) had to invite high school students in order for them to create an account. Back then, Facebok was much different. It was much more exclusive and was not as widely known or accepted in society.

Next I searched for Facebook in the Chicago Tribune and opted for search results to be displayed in chronological order, oldest first. Surprisingly, no results came up. There were two articles from 1990 that had the words "face" and "book" in them but had nothing to do with Facebook (obviously, as the site didn't exist yet). Finally I moved on to the Los Angeles Times and the same thing happened. I tried to search Facebook and different ways but every time the results were inconclusive or irrelevant.

When I searched for Facebook on ProQuest, I found something interesting. The earliest article, written by Susan DiMattia for the Library Journal in 2002, displayed this term in a different sense. It referred to "the Facebook" as a directory for a firm, complete with employee pictures and phone numbers. On Project Muse I found an article from 2006 that discusses the revolutionary ways through which students were beginning to sort through and process information. The article, written by Kate Wittenberg is entitled "Beyond Google: What Next for Publishing?" and touches on topics we have talked about not only in LIS 201 but also in other FIG classes. Wittenberg touches on the concepts similar to those surrounding "Digital Natives," as she talks about Facebook as a complex environment for social networking, a new revelation altogether. Finally I tried my search in JStor and found an article from the magazine American Libraries written in March 2006. It discusses the developing nature of online information storage. Clearly, Facebook- a new social phenomenon- was beginning to function as a platform through which young people could find and share information about themselves and their friends.

Overall the databases did not have as much content about Facebook as I was expecting. Still, it was interesting to see public reactions to the social networking site in the years when it was first open to the public.

History of the term "Computer Mouse"

My first search for the term "computer mouse" was in the New York Times. There, it was used first by Erik Sandberg-Diment in 1987, in an article entitled On Plato, Caves, and Spelunking, in which he discusses his search for a useful word processor. "Computer mouse" is mentioned because its inventor, Douglas Englebart, was working on a project related to hypertext and data organization that interested Sandberg-Diment for some reason. In the Chicago Tribune, the term first appeared in an even stranger context in 1989: an article about gardening. It described how a landscaper used the mouse to design gardens, which was probably an extremely novel idea at the time. Similarly, the term was first used in the LA Times in 1989 to talk about the process of movie coloring using a mouse to draw in boxes of color. From these two examples, we can see how useful and revolutionary the mouse was even from its earliest mentions.

On ProQuest, the first use of the term "computer mouse" found was recorded in February of 1985 in an article about the potential of home computer graphics programs. Interestingly, today, many computer artists see the mouse as an inferior tool, and prefer to use a tablet with a stylus for graphic art. I didn't read the whole article, but it's interesting that the usefulness of the mouse was being considered back then given it has now been somewhat replaced. Next, I searched Project MUSE for the term, and found some interesting results. The first recorded use of the term there occurred in 1997, much later than any of the other articles I've found so far. It was in an article about the use of books stored on CD-ROM and the use of this for children, and the "computer mouse" segment of the article was simply mentioning how one navigates through these books. Finally, in the JSTOR database, the earliest use of the term "computer mouse" returned to me was from the index of "Science News" from June 1983, though no actual article from said edition. However, if it was in the index, this means it was mentioned somewhere in there, which makes it the earliest mention I found so far.

In relation to how we use the term today, these articles don't show much variation in the use of the term "computer mouse" from 1983 to now. Of course, now we are a bit less impressed by the use of a mouse, and it might not even be mentioned in articles about computers today. With the rise of the laptop computer and tablets today, I'd imagine the mouse doesn't really get much mention in articles written today, actually. That would be something interesting to look into. Also interesting is the fact that the mouse took so long to get mentioned in both scholarly and journalistic articles, since it was actually invented in 1963, almost 20 years before it gets mentioned in any article I found. Based on some quick Wikipedia (read: lazy) research, I'd imagine this is because the first PC mouse was released in 1983, which would coincide with its mention in "Science News" that I found.

History of the Term "electronic mail"

The earliest article I was able to find that referenced electronic mail was from April 1960.  The article was "The American Archivist" and I found it on JStor.  It only mentions electronic mail once, but it says that Washington and another city will be testing email.  It also talks about the cost benefits of sending mail electronically over using the post office.

In other articles I found more abstract ideas on how mail would be delivered.  In the article from the Chicago Tribune from 1976, it said that people would electronically send their documents and letters to the post office where they would make a physical copy and send it through the mail service.  This idea includes the post office as a middle man which we do not have today.

The article from the LA Times (1976) says that email will be used for business aspects such as billing, making orders, and sending invoices.  This article views it as a control society tool, making business production faster.  It does not factor the social use of email, which is its primary use today.

This articles viewed the technology in a business setting.  They did not consider the use to connect with people outside of work.  Also, none of them used the terms "e-mail" or "email."  Articles that did use these modern phrasings are dated around 1990.

The idea of the technology, to send mail to others via electronic technology, remained the same throughout time.  However, the thought of who was using it differed from being a business technology to being a home technology.

Problems While Searching

While doing my search, I found that there was often typos in either the original text or the abstract.  One of these articles was "American Clerk unsienes" from 1856.  The word "smail" was typed instead of "small."  The person who wrote the abstract typed "email."  I found this typo multiple times, which extended my time searching.  Even when I refined my search dates to "after 1960" I still found articles with this typo.  I had to refine the search because many of the articles I was getting did not have "email" anywhere in the article.  So I refined the search to the years around the time that email was being invented.  I also found that I needed to type in "electronic mail" in order to get the older articles.

Below are the articles I found.

Work Cited

Dorothy Hill Gersack and Dolores C. Renze

The American Archivist , Vol. 23, No. 2 (Apr., 1960), pp. 211-236

"Foresee Overnight Mail Delivery Via Computers." Chicago Tribune (1963-Current file): 2. Jun 20 1976. ProQuest. Web. 20 Oct. 2013 .

Lipari, Joanna. "Arthur C. Clarke." Film Comment 20.6 (1984): 62,63,80. ProQuest. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

"Mailman of Future may be Electronic." Los Angeles Times (1923-Current File): 1. Oct 13 1976. ProQuest. Web. 20 Oct. 2013 .

By VICTOR K McELHENYThe New,York Times. "Citibank Uses Minis to Cut Maxi Tasks into Little Packages." New York Times (1923-Current file): 2. Feb 13 1977. ProQuest. Web. 20 Oct. 2013 .

http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/journals/american_annals_of_the_deaf/summary/v128/128.5.gibbs.html