This report is the first part of a sustained effort through 2014 by the Pew Research Center to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Lee wrote
a paper on March 12, 1989 proposing an “information management”
system that became the conceptual and architectural structure for the
Web. He eventually released the code for his system—for free—to the
world on Christmas Day in 1990. It became a milestone
in easing the way for ordinary people to access documents and interact
over a network of computers called the internet—a system that linked
computers and that had been around for years. The Web became especially
appealing after Web browsers were perfected
in the early 1990s to facilitate graphical displays of pages on those
linked computers.
It thus became a major layer of the
internet. Indeed, for many, it became synonymous with the internet, even
though that is not technically the case. The internet is rules
(protocols) that enable computer networks to communicate
with each other. The Web is a service that uses the network to allow
computers access files and pages that are hosted on other computers.
Other applications that are different from the Web also exploit the
internet’s architecture to facilitate such things
as email, some kinds of instant messaging, and peer-to-peer activities
like internet phone calling through services like Skype or file sharing
through torrent services.
Using the Web—browsing it, searching it,
sharing on it—has become the main activity for hundreds of millions of
people around the globe. Its birthday offers an occasion to revisit the
ways it has made the internet a part of Americans’
social lives.
This first report looks back at the
rapid change in internet penetration over the last quarter century, and
covers new survey findings about Americans’ generally positive
evaluations of the internet’s impact on their lives and
personal relationships. In the coming months, the Pew Research Center’s
Internet Project in association with
Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Project will further mark the 25th
anniversary of the Web by releasing eight reports about emerging trends
in digital technology that are based on surveys of experts about the
future of such things as
privacy, cybersecurity, the “internet of things,” and net neutrality.
We will also explore some of the economic change driven by the
spectacular progress that made digital tools faster and cheaper. And we
will report on whether Americans feel that the explosion
of digital information coursing through their lives has helped them be
better informed and make better decisions.
Rainie, L., Fox, S., & Duggan, M. (2014). the web at 25 in the U.S. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/27/the-web-at-25-in-the-u-s/
Find related reports about the future of the internet at http://www.pewinternet.org/topics/future-of-the-internet/. Find
related data about the long-term trends in technology adoption at http://www.pewinternet.org/three-technology-revolutions/.
