What is the Internet? by A. Michael Noll

Introduction

It is amazing to me that there seems to be confusion and controversy in answering the basic question: “What is the Internet?” I have no problem in defining it and have a short and simple answer to the question based on my personal experience with its predecessor, the ARPANET, from over 40 years ago.

This short essay is an attempt to explain the Internet using a simple approach with basic analogies from the past. Also some history will be reviewed about the development of the Internet.

The essay will conclude that the Internet is a packet-switched network. Today that network is formed from many regional and competitive packet networks that all link together to create a “network of networks.”

A Historical Perspective of Telephone Networks and Common Carriage

One way of understanding this is to consider the telephone network of the past. It was a circuit-switched network consisting of transmission facilities and circuit switches, along with a means of controlling the assignment of circuits (what telephone engineers called signaling). Circuits were assigned and carried signals over distances. Telephones and modems were connected to the network. The telephone network evolved into a network of networks. Standards were needed so these networks could interconnect and also interconnect internationally.

The Internet uses packet switching rather than circuit switching. Packet switching is more efficient for computerized data that occurs in short bursts. The header information that is included in a packet is comparable to the signaling information of the circuit-switched telephone network. Optical fiber, satellites, coaxial cable, and copper wire are some of the transmission media used for networks – circuit or packet switched.

In the even more distant past, stagecoaches carried packages over distances. The concept of common carriage was invented to regulate this industry. What was in a package was not the business of the common carrier. Rates were set by weight and distance. The common-carriage principle was then applied to the telephone network. As a common carrier, a telephone network operator was not involved with the content carried over a circuit. A circuit was defined in terms of its bandwidth, and a user could fill that bandwidth with any signal. Distance and the length of a call set charges.

A Little Personal History of Packet Switching

Packet switching was invented in the late 1960s as a way for the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) community to share then-costly data circuits. An early data circuit obtained from a telephone company carried only 56 kilobits per second. The intent was to allow the ARPA community to share computer resources, but the new network was used mostly for sending text, documents and early email. The concept was to place about 1,000 bits of data in a packet, along with information about its destination and source. The packets would then be really switched along to the destination and there reassembled.

Back in the early 1970s, the ARPANET was available only to ARPA researchers, but National Science Foundation (NSF) researchers also wanted access. ARPA wanted to sell that access. However, the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy (OTP) did not want an agency of the Federal government to be operating and selling a packet-switched telecommunication service, such as the ARPANET. I was then working on the staff of the White Office of Science and Technology (OST) and spoke to Dick Bolt of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman about the policy issue. As a result, BBN created a new company, Telenet, to offer packet switched service to the public.

A big issue back then was whether the ARPANET was a regulated common-carrier telecommunication service, or, since it involved access to computers, a non-regulated computer service or information service. The ARPANET used computers to switch the packets, and thus it was claimed to be a computer service. I believed that since the ARPANET, or any packet-switched network transmitted signals and switched them, it was a common-carrier service and should be regulated. The academic community that formed ARPA did not want any regulation, and this lobbied for the ARPANET and packet switching to be treated as a computer service. I felt then, and now, that it was a telecommunication service. If transmission and switching are the prime components of a service, then it is a telecommunication service – not a computer service. Indeed, the ARPANET could be used to gain access to computers, databases, and information, but that did not make it a computer service, anymore than the use of a modem over a telephone line would make the telephone network a computer or information service.

What Then Is the Internet?

The Internet is a packet-switched network of packet-switched networks. These networks could be public (open) or private (closed). Data signals are carried over that network over various transmission media and are packet switched along the way to their destinations. The data could represent voice, video, image, or text. The source could a home computer and the destination might be a large computerized database. Taken as a whole, the Internet and the various databases and other computerized services form a giant “world wide web” – or simply, the Web.

The controversy today seems to involve whether the Internet should be regulated, and if so, by whom and in what way. Should it be treated as if a common carrier? The confusion seems to go all the way back to its formation when computers and computing were confused with telecommunication transmission and switching.

Primary takeaways

Digital inequality shows larger impacts on youth academic performance as compared to time spent on screens.
Digital skills play a significant role in mediating unstructured online engagement (social media use, playing video games, browsing the web) and youth academic, social, and psychosocial development.
Unstructured online engagement and face-to-face social interaction are complementary and continuously interact to create and enhance youth capital outcomes.

A familiar story: concerns of screen time

Today’s discussions of adolescent well-being have coalesced around a clear narrative: teenagers spend too much time online, and their academic performance, mental health, and social lives are deteriorating as a result. A steady stream of academic papers, books, and op-eds, alongside a growing number of policy proposals––school phone bans, age-gated social media use, restrictive screen-time limits––rest on the same underlying claim, aligning with a contemporary, digitized version of the displacement hypothesis:

Screen time, particularly the unstructured, free-time spent on social media, gaming, watching video content, or browsing the web, is said to displace the productive face-to-face activities that build adolescents into capable adults.

The implied and often practiced solution is restriction. In response, this dissertation tested this claim directly, and placed it within the broader context of adolescence.

Across three years, I followed 653 Michigan adolescents from early through late adolescence: in grades 8 or 9 (survey one, 2019) to grades 11 or 12 (survey two, 2022). Notably, these students, studied over time, were part of a broader pooled sample of 5,825 students across the same eighteen highschools. The study window captured the year before and the year after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders, functioning as an unprecedented stress test for theories of adolescent social, academic, and digital life and, importantly, as a benchmark to compare the effects of pandemic-related change and inequality to those effects from screen time alone.

Across four studies of adolescents, consisting of six cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, findings are not consistent with the displacement narrative, nor the broader concerns about the time youth spend on screens.

Findings are, however, consistent with something the current public and (most) academic discussions have largely overlooked or ignored: the gaps and inequalities that determine whether adolescents can access and use the internet meaningfully in the first place.

What the displacement hypothesis overlooks

Displacement and related research and policy concerning the time young people spend online assumes a “zero-sum” model of adolescent day-to-day time. An hour online is an hour not spent studying, reading, sleeping, or interacting face-to-face (i.e., time spent on more productive or developmentally “better” activity).

Indeed, this makes sense logically. However, as an empirical claim, this model requires time spent online to behave differently from all other ways adolescents allocate time; it must produce uniquely negative outcomes and be inherently harmful across digital contexts, rather than the typical mix of trade-offs corresponding to, and often overlooked among any other social or developmental context.

Yet, online time does not differ from other youth activity. Instead, I find it has a mix of pros, cons, and even some “uniquely digital” benefits which youth utilize for social and academic gains. When I compared unstructured digital media use against traditional face-to-face interaction and activities, both produced similar patterns: some negative associations with academic outcomes, some null, and some positive.

Trade-offs within traditional face-to-face activity (for example, social time with friends and family, or time spent in after-school extracurriculars) are treated as ordinary developmental experiences that must be experienced for the betterment of development. The identical trade-offs involving digital time tend to be overlooked or ignored, and online engagement is perceived as altogether harmful.

A growing body of evidence, including this dissertation, do not support that distinction. Indeed, the developmental context is routinely misread, leaving out the context of the experiences and time spent on digital, as well as face-to-face activities, interactions, existing inequalities, and changes inherent to development. As such, I proposed a novel framework to understand these contexts:

Digital capital exchange

Rather than treating screen time as a unified harm, this dissertation advances an “exchange”-based framework, grounded in James Coleman’s theories of youth capital and digital inequality scholarship, particularly following Eszter Hargittai, Jan van Dijk, and Alexander van Deursen (see this list of all dissertation references for full works).

The core proposition is that adolescents’ online engagement is not an alternative to developmental activity but another, albiet modern domain through which young people accumulate and mobilize online resources––particularly digital skills––that work alongside existing social networks and experiences to be exchanged for human capital (measured as: academic achievement, aspirations, STEM interest) and social capital (peer networks, community participation, extracurricular involvement).

Online time is not the mechanism; instead, it is digital skills that I find to be the most vital component in youth capital exchange and enhancement. Unstructured online engagement contributes to online skills; those skills, accumulated and mobilized alongside existing peer, family, and community networks, translate into the outcomes researchers and parents care about, i.e., academic achievement, aspirations, and face-to-face interaction and social networks.

This digital capital framework treats online and in-person contexts as complementary rather than antagonistic, and it situates adolescents’ digital lives within the structural conditions––connectivity quality, device reliability, autonomy of use––that determine whether exchange can occur at all.

Methods (in brief)

Paper-and-pencil surveys were administered to students in classrooms at two time-points: spring 2019 (N=2,876) and spring 2022 (N=2,949), across the same eighteen predominantly rural Michigan schools, grades 8–12. Official, nationally-ranked standardized reading, writing, and math test scores (PSAT 8/9, PSAT 10, SAT; College Board) were then anonymously linked to students’ survey responses with the help of participating districts.

Cross-sectional path analyses modeled pooled and wave-specific samples (pooled N=5,825); two-wave cross-lagged panel models tested reciprocal, longitudinal relationships on the 653 students who completed both surveys. Multi-group analyses of the cross-lagged panel models compared relationships between girls (N=345) and boys (N=308). All longitudinal models included time-invariant socioeconomic covariates as well as time-varying covariates to reduce omitted-variable bias.

Key findings: an overview

To summarize, to the best of my ability, eight chapters across 376 pages, I present two primary findings:

First: digital inequality predicted larger and more consistent declines in human capital than screen time did.

Unreliable home internet and technology maintenance problems––experiencing and/or dealing with broken or outdated devices and software, restrictive school-issued hardware, issues with connecting to or maintaining internet access––decreased youth GPA and standardized test achievement. And, these effect sizes were substantially larger than any negative direct effect from unstructured digital media use.

Across all four empirical studies, digital inequality emerged as the most substantial predictor of academic and developmental decline.

Second: digital skills mediated the relationship between online time and adolescent academic and social outcomes.

Unstructured digital media use, particularly online gaming and web browsing, predicted higher internet and social media skills for adolescents, which in turn predicted stronger academic achievement and self-efficacy (human capital), and social interaction and extracurricular participation (social capital). The positive indirect effect of screen time through skills offset or exceeded any small negative direct effects across several outcomes (supporting our existing peer-reviewed work: Hales & Hampton, 2025, and which you can read more about here).

These exchange processes were amplified when peer and family networks were modeled alongside digital skills, consistent with the premise that online and offline contexts operate together rather than in competition. The effect was not universal: social media skills amplified rather than offset a negative association with consistency of interest, one of the two subscales of grit. The exchange framework describes a contextual and conditional, domain-specific mechanism, not a blanket defense of time spent online.

Implications

If digital inequality, and not screen time, is the primary predictor of adolescent academic and developmental decline, and still warrants concern regarding access quality and experience even with the broader adoption of digital devices across the United States, the current policy emphasis on restriction is pointed at the wrong target. The evidence supports a different set of priorities.

Stable, reliable home (fast) broadband should be treated as an educational prerequisite rather than a consumer amenity. Unreliable connectivity exerted larger downward pressure on human capital than any measure of screen time, and that pressure intensified during the pandemic-era reliance on digital infrastructure. Technology maintenance, device repair, replacement, technical support, and the flexibility to install software and explore the web autonomously, matters as much as initial access, and school-issued devices that restrict autonomous use appear to hinder skill accumulation rather than support it.

Restrictive parental mediation of internet use was negatively associated with grit and self-efficacy at magnitudes comparable to the positive contributions of face-to-face activity. This challenges the assumption that digital restriction functions protectively. Instructive mediation, teaching adolescents to verify information, navigate platforms critically, and mobilize online resources toward meaningful ends, is the posture the data supports.

Finally, the technical skill-building that occurs through gaming, self-directed exploration, and deep web use is skill-building, not wasted time. Closing the persistent gender gap in these domains likely requires legitimizing technical play for girls, rather than restricting it for everyone.

None of the above is an argument that screen time is benign. It is an argument that screen time is the wrong focus, particularly when studied mostly in isolation. Context matters substantially, whether that is time spent on other activities during adolescence, the period of adolescence itself, digital inequality, resources gained from such online use, and how all such factors interact. The factor that predicts whether a given adolescent can convert online engagement into capital outcomes is structural: access, infrastructure, skills, and the autonomy to use them. These factors are distributed unevenly, and its uneven distribution, not hours logged, is what separates adolescents who thrive from those who fall behind.

The full dissertation is available through Michigan State University’s ProQuest archive, or see the embedded full-text PDF below. I’m happy to share papers, preprints, or the underlying framework with anyone interested and working in this area––don’t hesitate to reach out via my contact form. Thanks for reading.

Tags:

What is the Internet? by A. Michael Noll