Internet

The Internet is a worldwide telecommunication network that allows for the transfer of data in many different forms for a wide variety of purposes, including communication and correspondence, entertainment, commerce, and many more. The Internet was developed from the technological foundation created for ARPANET, an initiative by researchers with the United States Department of Defense to provide a resilient telecommunication network.

In 1936, Shoghi Effendi wrote of a "mechanism of world inter-communication" that would become part of a future world commonwealth, describing it as "embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvellous swiftness and perfect regularity."; the Universal House of Justice described his words as foreseeing the Internet.

Characteristics and uses

A child in El Salvador joins a video conference to study online during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

The Internet is a "network of networks" that allows people to use computers and other devices to connect and communicate with each other regardless of their location. As of 2020, more than half of the world's population had access to the Internet. Its existence was foreshadowed in 1936 by Shoghi Effendi in one of his letters describing the characteristics of a future world commonwealth:

“ A mechanism of world inter-communication will be devised, embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvellous swiftness and perfect regularity. ” — The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, p.203

The Universal House of Justice described the characteristics of the Internet in its book Century of Light, acknowledging Shoghi Effendi's words as prescient:

“ Internet communication, which has the ability to transmit in seconds the entire contents of libraries that took centuries of study to amass, vastly enriches the intellectual life of anyone able to use it, as well as providing sophisticated training in a broad range of professional fields. The system, so prophetically foreseen sixty years ago by Shoghi Effendi, builds a sense of shared community among its users that is impatient of either geographic or cultural distances. ”

Common Internet applications

Owing to the versatility of the technology it is based on, the Internet allows for widely varying types of communication, including audio and video conferencing, electronic mail (e-mail), newsgroups, social media, and chat. It also allows for the storing and transmission of information in a wide variety of formats, including plain text, images, audio, video, hypertext (a multimedia information format featuring hyperlinks, as on the World Wide Web) and virtual reality environments. It supports collaboration and social interaction through the use of social media, group chat and conferencing, cloud storage, collaborative applications such as wikis, and multiplayer games and experiences.

Historical development

The Internet was developed from the technological foundation created for ARPANET, an initiative by researchers with the United States Department of Defense to provide a resilient telecommunication network that could withstand partial destruction, such as by a nuclear war.

Although initially restricted to American organizations, ARPANET began connecting to groups in Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom as early as 1973. While it was originally limited to a small number of organizations in the academic and military fields, access was expanded in the early 1980s, and the standardization of the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) permitted the worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks, leading to rapid growth. By 1988, the network included organizations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, and the first commercial Internet service providers began to emerge soon afterward. In 1990, ARPANET was decommissioned; by the end of the same year, the tools and infrastructure necessary for the establishment of the World Wide Web (WWW) had been created.

With the commercialization of the Internet in the mid-1990s, adoption of the technology as a platform grew rapidly and the types of services offered online multiplied, such as email, instant messaging, Internet telephony, Internet television, audio and video streaming, newspapers, blogging, Internet forums, and social networking. Businesses also began to move online, offering online shopping and e-commerce.

Bahá’í use of the Internet

World Wide Web

Official Websites

The official website of the Bahá’í Faith (bahai.org), as seen on March 1, 2001.

One of the earliest official websites associated with a Bahá’í institution was the web site of Bosch Bahá’í School, which was in operation as of 1995. The Bahá’í Computer and Communications Association, a grassroots organization which supported Bahá’í initiatives on the Internet, also operated a website at this time.

The official website of the Bahá’í community at bahai.org was established in July 1996. Upon its launch, the site offered basic information about the Bahá’í Faith in three different languages: English, French, and Spanish. By the following Riḍván, the site had registered 50,000 visits from more than 90 countries and territories. As of the year 2000, Portuguese and Arabic versions of the site had been added, along with two new sections of the site about social action and offering perspectives and profiles of individual Bahá’ís. Following a major redesign in August 2000, the site also became available in Chinese and Farsi (Persian).

The website of One Country, the newsletter of the Bahá’í International Community, was online as of 1998.

The Bahá’í World News Service, an Internet-based news service operated by the Bahá’í International Community, was launched on December 4, 2000.

Blogs

Blogs, or web logs, are online journals based on the World Wide Web which are used for a wide variety of purposes. From humble beginnings in the early 1990s, blogging became ubiquitous by the mid-2000s, with one count finding 19.6 million blogs in October 2005 and one new blog being created every second.

Seeing the potential to share Bahá’í perspectives online, individual Bahá’ís began to embrace blogging by the mid-2000s. A 2006 survey found 350 blogs produced by Bahá’ís, 75% of which were active, posting at least once every two months. Youth were seen as making especially notable contributions, blogging about topics such as years of service, experiences with Bahá’í community life (including Nineteen Day Feasts, study circles, and children's classes) and about the Bahá’í Faith its teachings. Certain initiatives, such as bahainine.com, sought to highlight content posted on Bahá’í blogs, while also allowing visitors to search a list of Bahá’í blogs for certain topics and keywords. Blog Action Day, an annual initiative by Australian Bahá’ís Collis and Cyan Ta'eed initiated in 2007, allowed blog owners to co-ordinate their efforts to engage in discourse on pressing social issues, with participants uniting to focus on a single issue each year. The inaugural Blog Action Day focused on the theme of the environment, drawing support from over 20,000 blogs.

Forums and social media

The Internet has been used for communication and social exchange since its inception, one of the earliest examples of which were interactive electronic guestbooks through which visitors to a website could leave greetings and messages for the owner of a website. These simple applications laid the groundwork for more complex ones, such as forums, text and image boards, and social media. These applications differ from USENET and email lists in that all messages are stored on a central website, which must be accessed in order to read and interact with them.

Forums (or web forums) are similar in function and purpose to message boards that existed on bulletin board systems (BBSes), in that they allow users to leave messages in themed groups or sub-forums which can then be read and replied to by others.

Policies and guidance on Internet use

The Bahá’í Internet Agency has published compilations and guidelines relating to Internet communications.