Epilogue
The Internet Age from the
Perspective of Media History
The establishment of digital technologies, computers and Internet communi-
cation is viewed as a new turning point, and one which has already led to enor-
mous societal changes. Since this process is still in flux, any pronouncements
made about it can only be of temporary value. This is why many early books
about the Internet already have a source-like character, like texts published
about the cinema in 1910 or television in 1960. At the same time, the Internet
shows the misperception of the future of media by many scholars of media
studies up to the 1980s, who argued that the media public would become
increasingly passive or that written culture would die out in the audio-visual
television age.
Yet this new computer-supported form of communication can be arranged
within the paradigms of five hundred years of media history, beginning with
its invention. Like many modern media, the computer owes its existence not
to a single brilliant inventor, but developed more or less concurrently in several
countries during the course of the 1940s, proving once again that media inno-
vations are responses to prevailing social needs. In this case the starting point
was the processing of complex data, followed by the need for information and
communication. In terms of the history of ideas, the groundwork for comput-
ers was also laid long ago. Indeed, media studies place the computer’s origins
as far back as the calculating machines of the seventeenth century, the binary
numbering system developed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and the card-
punch machines of the nineteenth century that were used in administrative
bureaus (Naumann 2001: 43).
Media history has often demonstrated that wars and conflicts promoted
the dynamic expansion of new media and communication forms, but were
not the father of media innovation per se. Military contexts did play a major
role in the invention of the computer and Internet, but this must nonetheless
be seen in perspective. The first functioning, freely programmable computer,