My aim in this article is to explore, in broad brush terms, the Internet and the World Wide Web as socio-technical phenomena integral to understanding New Media. I use the term ‘socio-technical' to make explicit the complex commingling of society and technology; such that an object like a computer has to be seen as the product of, and occupying space within, particular socio-technical assemblages. This notion inevitably taps into long-running academic debates about the sociology of science and technology. I also use the term ‘socio-technical' to foreground that the Internet and the World Wide Web are simultaneously technological and social artefacts - they bundle together in complex ways hardware, software, content, ideas, experiences and practices. These ideas are discussed below in order to untangle some of these ‘bundles' and help us begin to understand how we might study the World Wide Web.
The Internet is best thought of as an interconnected, global network of computers (and other ‘computational devices' such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), phones, and so on). In the late 1960s, various experiments in networked communication were being carried out, for various purposes, all driven by a shared enthusiasm to find new uses of emergent technologies in computation and telecommunications. Among these was ARPANET, an initially small network established by the US Department of Defense, connecting together a number of what were then considered supercomputers. For some people, this particular strand of the origin story of the Internet, its implication in the DoD's Cold War strategizing - building a network of distributed nodes able to evade or withstand nuclear attack - means that to this day the Internet is at root a military-governmental project, and this origin can never be disentangled from its uses and meanings to this day. Yet, it is important not to overstate this part of the Internet's origin, and to remember too that its development is part of a number of other political, economic and technological projects, some more or less driven by the state, some by the computer industries, some by countercultures emerging from hobbyist and hacker groups interested in computing as a tool for democracy or revolution.
These strands are often divergent in their aim, but share at root a belief in networked computers as a tool for progress (however that may have been configured). Of course, the Internet is not just computers and phone lines (until recently the principal means of connection between the ‘nodes' of the Internet). It is also software, in particular the protocols (with acronyms such as TCP, FTP, HTTP and IP) that enable data to pass along the network from node to node, to be ‘sent' and ‘received' in the right place at the right time, in the right way. Software also presents the Internet to us, in terms of the interface on the computer screen that visualizes the Internet in particular ways. These were once primarily textual, but are now truly multimedia, combining text, sound, still and moving images - in short, content. Now, some commentators would say that strictly speaking content isn't part of the Internet; it is the stuff carried by the Internet. But really, the Internet wouldn't be that useful and wellused if it didn't have all that content on it, so to me it makes little sense to disentangle the Internet from all that flows through it. And much of it flows to and from computers and screens - the interface is predominantly presented to us via a screen (on a computer, or increasingly a television, BlackBerry, PDA or mobile phone; note too that MP3 players usually also have a screen carrying information about the sound files they're storing). Our experience of the Internet is, therefore, significantly mediated by screens, whether we're sending an email or browsing a virtual bookshop. Of course, there are times when we also experience the Internet as something more than or other than a screen - viruses remind us of its dense interconnectedness, crashes remind us of the (breakable) connecting routes, the varying speed of connection reminds us of the changing volume of users worldwide, and error messages remind many of us of how poorly we actually understand everything that is going on ‘behind the scenes' or ‘between the screens'.
And the Internet is also an imaginative, even imaginary space, filled up with ideas and experiences, fear and excitement, banality and wonder. But, it is fair to say that most ‘ordinary users' connect with the Internet on screen, via an interface - most notably the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is a user-friendly interface onto the Internet. The Web also has a well-known origin story, too: it was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist working in a mega-laboratory called CERN, where boffins collide miniscule bits of matter in an effort to uncover the ultimate building blocks of life, the universe and everything. Berners-Lee was working to solve some problems at CERN to do with scientists sharing and accessing information, and he ended up writing a program that turned the Internet into a publishing medium via, to reiterate Gauntlett, a user-friendly interface. The birth date of the World Wide Web is often cited as 6 August 1991, though it was a couple of years before this amazing innovation really took off, when Berners-Lee's idea was joined to a widely and freely available browser called Mosaic. The Web is a way of managing content on the Internet, based on shared protocols and standards. This means that all kinds of material is made available, can be stored on and accessed from any type of computer (providing it has the necessary computing power and connections), thanks to the use of a common computer language, Hypertext Markup Language or HTML. HTML is (or was) like the Esperanto of the Web, a way to ‘translate' different kinds of data and move them around the Internet, where a browser can find them.
But, there is a second key component to Berners-Lee's innovation: the hyperlink. This really powers the Web, in that it is a way of connecting collections of data, such as web pages, together. Hyperlinks, together with those door-openers' search engines, have given us the experience of moving through the World Wide Web, of navigating by clicking on links and being transported from page to page, site to site. So, the World Wide Web is a key way of accessing, managing, connecting, producing and consuming information over the Internet. While there are other significant uses of the Internet, notably email, most of the time most of us are using it to access the World Wide Web. But where is the World Wide Web, or the Internet - and where do we ‘go' when we use it? At one level, we aren't going anywhere: we're in front of a screen, our computational device connecting us to other devices, with data streaming between them. We have to think about more nuts and bolts, wires and chips, bits and bytes: we have to think about the symbolic and experiential aspects of being online.
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