Dot.com BOMB

It took two entire class periods to go over this, but I'll try and condense it as much as I can.  The Dot.com BOMB that we discussed is basically a 5-stage process that greatly affects a certain function of society.  An example of this can be seen in other forms such as the gold rush that led to the creation of large communities such as Seattle.  This is a bit vague, but you'll understand in a minute hopefully. The 5 stages are:  Innocent, Boom, Insanity, Bust, and Recovery.  I'll go over each and what they mean...

1. Innocent - In 1992 users payed a monthly fee, plus a fee per data transfer on the web, but then the World Wide Web came and offered many free functions that users would not need to pay for.
2. Boom - This 'Internet in a Box' that was "so easy your grandma can get on the internet" was the gold rush that made many people abandon previous ways of using the web.
3. Insanity - Because of this, there was a huge increase in new companies that wanted to take part in the new phenomenon.  This caused instabililty in the market due to shares being sold cheaper to investors, while being projected as being more expensive when hitting the market which made many focus more on money, without focusing on reliability of going to market
4. Bust - Since borrowing on the market depends on the value of the company, valuations dropped quickly after many companies tried to keep their stocks while pretending everything was fine.  Behind the scenes though, people were being laid off and cut out.
5. Recovery - After the catastrophe, many were laid off, but people came together to support each other, the job market started to rebound a bit, and things slowly came back together.

Learning all of this was very important to me because in order to function better in society, it is important to know how things work in terms of business and the web, especially now that my generation is so absorbed in new and developing technologies.