Pay bills, read the news, play games, watch ridiculous people doing even more ridiculous things, research anything, create and contribute multimedia content, stalk an ex, check the weather, attempt to convince the world your interesting – just a short list of the many things we can and do do online.

But is this how the creators envisioned their brainchild? Certainly not.

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider was hired in the early 1960s to develop a system that would enable the department of defense to effectively and efficiently communicate during the Cold War. The project would be coined the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) at its inception but then would be changed to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1971. Another change in 1993 would officially title the project ARPA once again and finally in 1996 the name changing would come to a long overdue end with the once more official title of DARPA.

Regardless of name change the concept has also changed immensely since the early '60s. Originally a government tool, the Internet as it exists today is vital to many or our lives and is proving to be a tool that could offer a better way of life to many others in less fortunate parts of the world through programs such as One Laptop per Child (OLPC).

The Internet is increasingly becoming the average man’s key to access and affect the world around him – a world that not that long ago would have been completely beyond his means. Today more and more people are staking claim to their very own slice of the online world. Whether they do this through social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook where they list intimate details of their lives for all to see, or through their own web sites, built with knowledge and tools readily available online. With the prevalence of sites such as Wikipedia your average Joe next door can even publish a history of the internet that many will simply assume to be complete fact.

This brings us to the future of the Internet - where do we have to go from now, can we even imagine? Many theories exist; some even foresee the demise of news as we know it. Dramatic, but might they be on to something? Check out Epic 2014 to see this dramatic theory that is sure to get you theorizing yourself.