A Social History of the Web

The World Wide Web, or as we more commonly know it, "the web," has been around in a formal sense for just over 25 years. That is, it was proposed and created in the early 1990s and has flourished ever since.

The web is actually the culmination of diverse efforts in networked computing aimed at increasing our ability to store and access information. The web is the result of numerous experiments in communications and signaling. The web is the manifestation of a goal that has been posited by philosophers and thinkers for ages: How can we better harness the human intellect?

In this chapter we will investigate where the web came from. We will look at both the technical and the cultural history of the web.