In the mountains of North Carolina, four springtime hikers reported missing in the evening were back to safety by midnight. In a rugged park near the San Francisco Bay, two other hikers, lost after dark, were promptly found by a California Highway Patrol helicopter. In both cases, the hikers could have suffered from hypothermia, lack of food and water, and the scare of their lives. The key to their speedy rescue was a device from their more urban lives—their mobile phones, which had Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. The lost hikers simply had to call an emergency number, and rescuers found the lost callers using the latitude and longitude coordinates transmitted from the phone’s built-in GPS signal.

Around the world, hikers with mobile phones are no longer lost—at least as long as their batteries last, and if they can find a signal. In the wilderness of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the rate of search and rescue missions in the area has dropped by more than half over the past decade as people use GPS to find their own way out. In Tasmania, Australia, local authorities retired their team of trained search and rescue dogs after mobile phones with GPS reduced the need for search missions for missing bushwalkers. “Everybody carries a mobile phone now, and the service is pretty good in most areas—if you are lost you can often climb to the top of a hill and get service,” said the founder of Search and Rescue Dogs of Tasmania.¹

Back in the cities and suburbs, mobile phones with GPS are less like survival tools and more like life trackers. On services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you can share, with precise coordinates, where you are, where you’ve been, and where your photos were taken. In fact, some of these services automatically geo-tag the location of photos and posts. As it turns out, sharing your every move on social media becomes much more valuable when you have GPS—to you, to your friends, and to advertisers. Several companies, such as Foursquare, Yelp, and Poynt, encourage users to check in at local business locations, earn points and savings, and share their reviews, recommendations, and locations with friends. Poynt combines GPS location data with users’ search terms to more precisely target consumers with location-based advertising. “We know where your customer is and what they are looking for so that you can tailor your advertising message accordingly,” Poynt notes. But what is a boon for advertisers and customers—more specific, and therefore more useful, ads—needs to be balanced against concerns of too much consumer surveillance. Even though consumers are volunteering their location by allowing their social media posts to be geo-tagged or by using location-based services, some are balking at the idea of advertisers and their mobile phone companies collecting and even saving this information.

Wireless mobile technologies change our relationship with the Internet. It used to be that we would sit down, log on, and go “on” the Internet. Now, the Internet goes with us, and knows, at every moment, where we are.

THE INTERNET, the vast network of telephone and cable lines, wireless connections, and satellite systems designed to link and carry digital information worldwide, was initially described as an information superhighway. This description implied that the goal of the Internet was to build a new media network, a new superhighway, to replace traditional media (e.g., books, newspapers, television, and radio), the old highway system. In many ways, the original description of the Internet has turned out to be true. The Internet has expanded dramatically from its initial establishment in the 1960s to an enormous media powerhouse that encompasses—but has not replaced—all other media today.

In this chapter, we examine the many dimensions of the Internet, digital media, and convergence. We will:

As you read through this chapter, think back to your first experiences with the Internet. What was your first encounter like? What were some of the things you remember using the Internet for then? How did it compare with your first encounters with other mass media? How has the Internet changed since your first experiences with it? For more questions to help you think through the role of the Internet in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.