American Libraries and the Internet: The Social Construction of Web Appropriation and Use By Bin Li

American Libraries and the Internet: The Social Construction of W ...

Chapter 1:

The World Wide Web: A General Introduction

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There are two ages of the Internet—before Mosaic, and after. The combination of Tim Berners-Lee’s Web protocols, which provided connectivity, and Marc Andreesen’s browser, which provided a great interface, proved explosive. In 24 months, the Web has gone from being unknown to absolutely ubiquitous. (Pesce quoted in Gromov, 2002)

“Absolutely ubiquitous” might be an exaggeration of the Web’s popularity at the time. Yet the Web was partly responsible for the dramatic change of the Internet from a research tool to a popular medium by offering an attractive, graphical, and easy-to-use application to masses of potential users (Klopfenstein, 2000). Besides being a researcher’s play tool and a channel for exchanging messages, the Internet has also become an entertainment center, a shopping mall, and “a vehicle for presenting one’s persona to the world” (Abbate, 1999, p. 218).

The Web has grown at an exponential rate within a comparatively short period of time. Figure 1.1 shows the growth of Web sites till September 2006. At that time, there were almost 97 million Web sites around the world (Zakon, 2006). The latest DNS Domain Survey Report released by the Internet Software Consortium showed dramatic growth to over 433 million in the number of hosts worldwide (Internet Software Consortium, 2007). The most common domain names of sites were .net and .com, which took up 38% and 18%, respectively, of the total top-level domains on the Internet.

As for the number of people going online throughout the world, surveys have used all sorts of measurement parameters, but there seems to be no uniform answer to the seemingly simple question of how many people are online. Klopfenstein (2002) found significant differences in estimates for the number of U.S. Web users by four of the top Web ratings companies.