Student Essay Version 2 V-LO2: Identify the historical context of ideas and cultural traditions outside the U.S. and how they have influenced American culture. ● Consider a technology invented outside of the U.S. in your discipline. (a) Describe the cultural and social factors that led to this technology’s “invention.” (b) Describe how this invention has evolved and influenced the culture of the U.S. (250-500 words) One of the more novel information services available on the Internet is the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW consists of pages of information sent over the Internet using a protocol called hypertext transfer protocol (http). There were several social and cultural factors that led to the development of the WWW. The codes used to make web pages, hypertext markup language (html), and http were developed by Timothy Berners-Lee, a physicist who worked at CERN, a particle physics lab in Geneva. The web was developed to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world. Berners-Lee's creation of the WWW was fueled by his personal belief that the WWW could be a force for social change and individual creativity. Berners-Lee saw the web as expanding and changing the way that people communicate across the globe. In addition, he believed that open communication would lead to greater freedom and social growth than ever before possible. The WWW became available on the Internet in the early 1990s. The WWW is the fastest growing Internet tool for users and businesses desiring to establish their cyberspace presences on the Internet. It is based on a hypertext paradigm, in which a document is organized as a graphical collection of multimedia objects, each of which has pointers to other relevant objects. The WWW provides the necessary tools to let anyone attach a website, and it exemplifies an open marketplace exchange of ideas. The top level domains on the Internet include com for commercial; edu for education; gov for nonmilitary government agencies; mil for military agencies; org for other types of organizations, such as nonprofit or research associations; and net for network.2 Web addresses, like those above, generally indicate that the website is located in the United States. The highest level internationally would indicate a country. The web address for Oxford University in the United Kingdom (UK) is http://www.ox.ac.uk/; the uk in the URL indicates this site is in the UK. The number of WWW pages has exponentially expanded since the early 1990s, and currently there are more than 1 billion web pages [1]. These web pages are becoming more interactive and complex. It is common to watch videos, download music, view photos, and play games on the WWW. In addition, more business is being conducted via the Internet. Both consumers and businesses are finding it easier to compare prices on-line to get the best deals. This new use of the Internet, e-commerce, has changed the way people interact with their world. Commented [PAB1]: The section in yellow refers to my answer to the first question. Commented [PAB2R1]: The WWW has impacted people all over the world including those living in the United States. As of 2016, approximately 88.5% of the U.S. population used the internet—this equates to more than 286 million people in the U.S. who use the WWW [2]. In particular, more people in the U.S. are using e-commerce. Although, at first, we might think of ecommerce as a consumer purchase of a product through the Internet, most ecommerce is actually done through business-to-business interactions. In fact, businessto-business e-commerce generates ten times the revenue as does business-toconsumer e-commerce. The automobile industry, for example, uses e-commerce to manage its parts suppliers and to reduce the costs involved with purchasing parts. By 2020, according to Forrester Research, approximately 12% of all business to business transactions will be digital [3]. Although e-commerce is increasing, it still constitutes only a small percentage of total sales in the United States (about 8 percent). As of Spring 2016, consumers averaged 97.5 billion in e-commerce for the 2nd quarter of the year [4]. Over the last few years, the amount of business-to-consumer e-commerce has increased significantly each year. “In 2015, 205 million U.S. citizens were online shoppers and had browsed products, compared prices or bought merchandise online at least once. These figures are projected to reach 224 million in 2019, positioning the United States as of one the leading e-commerce markets based on online shopper penetration” [5]. The U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that all types of e-commerce will continue to grow at an ever-increasing rate over the next few years. 1 Total number of websites. (2017, June 19). Internet Live Stats Retrieved from http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/ 2 United States Internet Users 2017, June 19). Internet Live Stats Retrieved from http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/us/ 3 Clancy, H. (2015, April 6). Where’s the $1 trillion action in e-commerce? Business to business, Fortune, Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2015/04/06/1-trillion-ecommercebusiness-to-business/ 4 U.S. Census Bureau. (2016, August 16). Quarterly Retail E-commerce Sales, 2nd Quarter 2016. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/retail/mrts/www/data/pdf/ec_current.pdf 5 The Statistics Portal (2016). Number of digital shoppers in the United States from 2014 to 2019 (in millions). Retrieved from http://www.statista.com/statistics/183755/number-of-us-internet-shoppers-since-2009/ Commented [PAB3]: The section in green refers to my answer to the second question.
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