Starting in the early 2000s, new technologies and softwares allowed the World Wide Web (see below) to become an outlet for discourse that had previously taken place on USENET. Chat rooms, weblogs (or "blogs"), wikis, and other Web applications allowed users to quickly share information. The new technologies also provided users with the ability to better personalize content to their needs.
World Wide Web
The Internet's content runs the gamut from current and classic scientific, social, and cultural material to family entertainment, commercial advertising, and even graphic pornography. However, once an individual has accessed the Internet through his or her computer, it would be a daunting task to find unaided the specific host among millions that has the content the user desires and then to locate that data in the host computer's file system. Various programs have been devised to ease the problem. For example, the Archie program, created in 1989, provided a searchable index of FTP-transmittable files.
Accessing Internet content was further simplified with the creation in the early 1990s of the World Wide Web, at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research; formerly, Conseil Européene pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the joint European atomic research facility in Geneva. The World Wide Web, or, simply, the Web, is a collection of electronic documents, or Web pages. A Web page, in turn, is a single file comprising text, multimedia material (such as images, video, and audio), or both that is created and accessed using the hypertext markup language (HTML), the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), and the uniform resource locator (URL).
HTML and HTTP. An individual constructing a Web page controls the material's appearance and organization using HTML tags, a set of codes that divides the document into separate elements, such as headings and paragraphs, and that controls where these elements are placed within the page. The tags also allow multimedia material to be inserted and positioned in the page and permit the insertion of hypertext links.
A hypertext link is literally a connection between documents. Following a link is usually a simple "point-and-click" operation, in which a computer mouse is used to place an onscreen cursor over the linked element in the page (such as a piece of text or an image); a click on the mouse button activates the link, sending the user to the targeted document. The HTTP enables a client computer (usually one running a browser, described below) to send a request to a server to retrieve a Web page.
Browsers. Web pages are displayed and their links accessed using a browser, a computer program that utilizes the HTTP to communicate with Web servers (servers that store and transmit Web pages). The Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers (from Netscape Communications Corporation and Microsoft Corporation, respectively) have been particularly popular.
URL. Each Web page is assigned a URL so that the page can be retrieved from among the hundreds of millions of publicly accessible pages on the World Wide Web. The URL is a text string that contains the name (as created through the domain naming system) of the server being accessed and the location of information stored in that server. A typical URL would therefore have the form www.scholastic.com/earlylearner, with www.scholastic.com being the domain name and earlylearner being a Web page. (However, just typing in a domain name without a file name attached will typically bring up a default Web page from the server rather than leave the computer screen blank.)
Hypertext links on the Web typically connect users to additional URLs, which means that by following a link, the user can easily be routed to a Web page stored on a server located anywhere in the world.
XML. Extensible markup language (XML) is a newer and more versatile system than HTML for Web document creation. Actually a scaled-down version of a more complex tool, standard generalized markup language (SGML), XML permits customized tags to be placed in a Web page. In this way XML can be used to create more intricately structured Web pages than can HTML. Moreover, XML is better adapted than HTML for creating links. Although by 2003 XML had not supplanted HTML, the newer tool's popularity was increasing.
Commercial Impact of the Internet
Commercial use of the Internet has become widespread, as has Web-based advertising. The late 1990s saw a surge in the creation of new, publicly traded companies selling goods and services through the Web. Public confidence in the viability of Web-based businesses (referred to colloquially as dot.coms) swelled so greatly that the stock value of many of these companies quickly reached dizzying heights, even among businesses with little chance of becoming profitable. By the beginning of the 21st century, however, Internet stock prices had fallen dramatically as it became apparent that numerous dot.coms were not succeeding financially. Although the commercial potential of the Internet continues to be tapped, entrepreneurs and investors have come to better understand both the potential and the limitations associated with Internet-based commerce.
Social Impact of the Internet
The social ramifications of Internet use are not necessarily clear-cut. For example, in the mid- to late 1990s the American psychologist Robert Kraut and his colleagues found evidence that individuals who extensively use the Internet experience increased loneliness and depression. Moreover, heavy Internet use appeared to shrink, rather than expand, the individuals' social circle and reduce their interactions with family members. However, in later research Kraut discovered that these problems seemed largely to have dissipated in persons from the original study and that for individuals with a normally extroverted personality, Internet use could over time lead to increased community involvement and improved self-esteem. Nonetheless, Kraut found that, for reasons not clearly understood, spending a great deal of time on the Internet also appeared to intensify emotional stress in persons studied.
