How to Evaluate a Source

The essay I am using is off of “The Electric Typewriter” webpage. The essay is called “Forty years of the internet: how the world changed forever.” In the essay, Oliver Burkeman writes about the societal changes that the internet has gone through and the timeline of the computer of the last 40 years. Oliver Burkeman is a credible author. He is a british journalist who has worked in London, Washington, and New York. Oliver won Foreign Press Association’s “Young journalist of the year” award and the “Science story of the year”. He has written two books called “The Antidote: Happiness for People who can’t Stand Positive Thinking” and HELP! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done” which are highly reviewed by multiple authors. In addition to this, Burkeman has a blog where he discusses “social psychology, self-help culture, productivity and the science of happiness,” etc. He also is a writer for The Guardian, and writes a monthly column for a magazine called “psychologies.” The article talks about the past 40 years and the invention of the computer. It shows the development of the computer. The article discusses how it started off as IPM. The article starts with debating who created the computer. It is discussed that Kleinrock made the first connection to the IPM or interface message processor. They talk about how Kleinrock was able to message a computer from Stanford and that is known as the first time a computer made connection to another. He then goes on to talk about modern technology and how the internet affects people now. He summarizes all of the past phases. Phases such as “eBay and Facebook and Twitter, blogging, the browser wars, Google Earth, filesharing controversies, the transformation of the record industry, political campaigning, activism and campaigning, the media, publishing, consumer banking, the pornography industry, travel agencies, dating and retail” (Burkeman) are such pivotal pieces of the history of the internet. All of these huge milestones that are discussed in this essay. Another reason I chose it is because the author also talks about his personal experiences with the internet and how he has seen it evolve. He talks about how he sent his first email in 1994 and discusses how he got his “first mobile phone, which came with two batteries: a very large one, for normal use, and an extremely large one, for those occasions on which you might actually want a few hours of power”. He then discussed the evolution of the phones in his personal experiences. He also discusses the physical computer network and the way everything is connected. This connects to Anderson’s piece and the arguments about how everything is connected and always available. He then talks about the future of the internet and how in the past 40 years everything has changed so much but it means nothing compared to where it’s going to go. “As Crocker points out, when you’re dealing with exponential growth, the distance from A to B looks huge until you get to point C, whereupon the distance between A and B looks like almost nothing; when you get to point D, the distance between B and C looks similarly tiny.” (Burkeman) He ends it talking about how the best is yet to come which I like because he is right in looking toward the future.