Thirty years after the Internet was created as a communications system of last resort, the network fulfilled its mission during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- but in ways more sweeping than its founders could have imagined.
It reunited families and connected them with shelter. It turned amateur photographers into chroniclers of history and ordinary people into pundits. It allowed television stations to keep broadcasting and newspapers to keep publishing. It relayed heartbreaking tales of loss and intimate moments of triumph.
In the process, the Internet cemented itself further into the American mainstream, demonstrating the flexibility that its designers envisioned and a vibrancy they did not.
"The Web has become the media of public service, of communication, of original content," said Jeffrey Cole, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication's Center for the Digital Future. "I think this will be viewed as the first event that demonstrates what the Web has become in terms of being transformational in people's lives."
The Net was designed as a decentralized military network that could keep commanders in contact even if most of the nation's infrastructure was wiped out in a nuclear war. But the commercial and social applications of the last 10 years have outstripped that original vision.
Indeed, even as government agencies struggled to respond to Katrina, millions of regular people mobilized themselves online.
The postings at online bulletin board Craigslist have been jammed with offers of shelter from across the country. More than half of the $503 million in donations that have poured into the American Red Cross have been made online. In the nearly two weeks since Katrina came ashore, Yahoo News posted the four busiest days in its history.
In Houston, a room in the Astrodome that formerly held baseball souvenirs is now a makeshift computer lab, where some victims of the hurricane saw their first photos of the devastation. They could also contact relatives, find housing and start filling out forms for government assistance.
"I lost everything: no ID, no Social Security. Everything," said 41-year-old New Orleans resident Lule Youngblood, now living at the Astrodome. "But this nice young man showed me how to use this computer to try to get help. I never thought that I would be using something like this."
