Internet

A global network of computer systems, the Internet has grown extremely rapidly from its origins in the U.S. Department of Defense in the 1960s to one of the most important sites of social and cultural communication in the lives of a majority of Americans. Although access to the Internet is still marked by notable inequalities, the speed, depth, and consistency of interaction it enables are helping reshape, or reinforce, notions about social and cultural identity.

Building on work done at the RAND Corporation in the early 1960s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) at the U.S. Department of Defense and the private computer consulting firm Bolt Beranek and Newman began developing the Internet in 1966. The initially small network grew steadily through the development of new technologies, such as the data transmission protocol TCP/IP and common standards for e-mailing, which made the Internet more accessible and useful to more people. Despite these innovations, it remained largely a space dominated by computer scientists and enthusiasts until the early 1990s.

In 1990, while working for the European nuclear agency CERN, computer scientist Tim Ber-ners-Lee developed a computer language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which dramatically increased the interactive and expressive potential of the Internet. As a result of this new technological development, users could now create and access personalized “pages” on a global network that was dubbed the World Wide Web.

Even so, the Internet's basic community of users was slow to change, and it was not until 1992, when a change to U.S. “fair use” policy allowed businesses to begin using the Web for commercial purposes, that the network began attracting a broader segment of the population as users. In 1992, for instance, the Web contained less than 100 Web sites, but three years later that number had increased more than 100-fold to more than 10,000 Web sites, mainly commercial.

By the same year, more than 35 percent of Internet users reported that they had three years or less of computer programming experience, and almost 17 percent had no experience at all. These figures illustrate the beginnings of the change in the Internet and its demographics, from a space dominated by computer science professionals and serious hobbyists to one that was used primarily by people without high levels of technical training.

By the same token, the last decades have also seen a rapid increase in the number of people who have consistent access to the network. The 2010 U.S. Census reports that the number of households with Internet access has risen sharply since the 1990s. Whereas less than 20 percent of households reported having access to the Internet in 1997, 68.7 percent of the U.S. population reported having Internet access at home in 2009.