Internet+ Age Emergence and Technology

The Internet+ Age evolved from, as Lawrence Lessing describes it, “a . . . `new society,’ . . . the Internet, or, . . . `cyberspace’. . . . [that] emerged in the West. . . . in the mid-1990s.” In those most-immediate-pre-Internet+ days, the growth of Internet usage, networking, and digital communication of ever-increasing amounts of information moving at very high speeds worldwide provided the necessary preconditions and impetus for emergence of the Internet+ Age about two decades later, around 2007. That’s when, as Thomas Friedman documents, many of the hard- and software products that distinguish the Internet+ Age broke through from their 1990s, and earlier, predecessors and began to permeate and dominate all of life:

• Smartphones, specifically, Apple’s iPhone, was announced in 2007
• Facebook, “started to scale globally” in 2007
• Twitter“also started to scale globally” in 2007
• YouTube, built in 2005, was bought by Google in late 2006
• Androidwas “launched” in 2007
• Kindlewas “released” in 2007
• The cloud“emerge[d]” in 2007
• Sensors, miniaturized and inexpensive, began to be in wide use around 2007
• Mobil appsare another important part of The Internet+ Age. In 2008, apps available through app stores began appearing.
• Blockchain,a major component of the Internet+ Age, was developed in 2008.
• TheInternet of Things(IoT), initiated in 2008, was a key component of the Internet+ Age by 2010.
• Machine learning(ML), another major component of the Internet+ Age, attained a notable level of advancement in 2011 when IBM’s Watson defeated two human champions in a Jeopardy! competition.
• Artificial intelligence(AI) emerged in a significantly advanced version in 2011 with Apple’s Siri.