Internet & Melissa 101

About Melissa
I'm in my second year in the mass communication program at Texas State, with a new media concentration. I’m originally from Houston, TX, but have been lucky enough to live in the Austin area for the past 11 years. I studied Communication for my BA at Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX. While in school, I had internships in PR, advertising and publishing and couldn’t wait to launch a career in communication, of some sort. After I graduated I got a job doing photo research at a publisher, which was interesting, but not my calling. Then I worked in radio and advertising sales for while, which was fun, but I loved the friends I made there more than the job.

Feeling a little lost a few years out of college, I started working in the nonprofit sector and felt at home with the warm fuzzies I felt at work everyday. Yes, the work can be tasking, the hours long and thankless, and the pay leaves a lot to be desired, but I like working for something bigger. In my job I get to sell that warm fuzzy feeling to other people by raising funds to support our mission. Communication is a huge part of my job when it comes to relaying information and stewardship opportunities to our donors. Every interaction with a donor has to be calculated and prescribed.

Through this course, I look forward to bringing new ways to communicate through new media into my job and personal life. This summer I took Cindy's New Media Issues class and my eyes widened to all the potential opportunities and avenues that open, both personal and professional, from obtaining online media skills. Feel free to check me out on Facebook, Twitter, or my New Media Blog.

History of the Internet
Since the first time I've seen The History of the Internet, a few new thoughts stood out to me. I found the motivators behind inventing various stages of internet technology very interesting. None of the inventors claimed that they set out to invent what we now know as the Internet. One of the first motivators was national security since the phone system during war time was not reliable. Another motivator that was also the result of turbulent war times, was frustrations and a new activist era that spawned new ideas. This makes me wonder if it weren't for wars, would the invention of the internet come much later without national security at the forefront as a major motivating factor? This reasoning did not just motivate people to invent, but was also key in providing the funds needed to give technology research the boost it needed. Computer science had to shift from being aligned with science fiction to getting taken seriously as a research technology that would be integral to the development and protection of our society as a whole. The inventors who contributed to the development of the internet had a much smaller scale goal in mind and through various motivators, collaboration, and possibly chance, the Internet was the end point.