Introduction: The Web’s first 25 years

Introduction

In August 2016, we can celebrate the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Or can we? There is no doubt that the World Wide Web – or simply: the Web – has played an important role in the communicative infrastructure of most societies since the mid-1990s, but when did the Web actually start? And how has the Web developed from its beginning until today? The six articles in this Special Issue/section revolve around one of these questions in various ways.

What to celebrate?

Anniversary celebrations are somewhat arbitrary excuses for drawing the public’s attention to events that took place in the past – after all, 25, 100 and 500 years are just random figures. But despite their arbitrary nature, anniversary celebrations constitute welcome occasions to (re)create and support our collective memory by offering an opportunity to re-evaluate events of the past and their implications for life today, be they cultural or political events, the work of literary authors or technological innovations. By mirroring our present in the past, anniversary celebrations can also remind us about technologies that have become an integrated part of our daily lives in such a manner that we tend to forget how and why we use them.

Most events come with a clear-cut date for when they should be commemorated: World War II broke out on 1 September 1939, the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989 and French author Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913. But in relation to some events, in particular technological innovations, fixing a specific date to celebrate may be more difficult. Should we celebrate the moment when the idea for an innovation was formulated? Should the thoughts and technologies paving the way for the idea be included? Should the prototype or the finished product be celebrated? Or was the technology not invented until it was made publicly or commercially accessible, or maybe not even until its number of users reached a critical mass? How these questions are to be answered is in part a function of each individual scholar’s specific research question, focus and interest.

Asking for a date to celebrate is asking for an origin. An eminent guide to help understand this quest for an origin and the philosophy of history it implies is Michel Foucault, whose seminal text ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ from 1971 draws a distinction between history performed in a ‘traditional’ manner, and history as genealogy.

According to Foucault, traditional history adopts a metahistorical, teleological and idealistic approach where a clearly defined origin – closed upon itself – is uncovered; an origin that constitutes the timeless, unified and essential beginning of a completed development. In contrast, history as genealogy is in the midst of things, setting out to discover descent, provenance and emergence by looking for heterogeneities, messiness, lines of influence, struggles, forces and conflicting interpretations:

Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things […]. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us […]. The search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself. (Foucault, 1984: 81–82)

On the one hand is the origin – the starting point of an uninterrupted continuity. On the other hand is a point of emergence – the stage for interruptions and discontinuities:

The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which metaphysicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us. (Foucault, 1984: 95)

In relation to technological innovations, these reflections by Michel Foucault can inspire us not to ask for one origin, one date to celebrate. Instead of searching for a point in time, one should rather look for a period of time in which the innovation emerged. Something that we may best understand as a ‘period of formation’, characterised by a number of defining moments, each of which constitutes a moment when different actors – human as well as non-human – clash and lines of influence constitute a network of interacting forces.

And it is not only the time when a technology was invented that can best be understood as a period of formation, because the same thing applies to the time that follows the invention. In this sense, technology is constantly formed and shaped in a continuous interplay between its socio-technical potentialities and its actual social use, marked by a number of defining moments at which hitherto unacknowledged potentialities are made visible (cf. Brügger, 2002: 44–48).

Formation of the Web

In the case of the Web, the period of formation stretches from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, and it is, in particular, characterised by one centre of gravity, namely the English software developer Tim Berners-Lee, who was employed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. But Tim Berners-Lee did not act in a vacuum, because his ideas and actions are constantly brought into play with a number of other actors, be they organisations such as CERN, the European Conference on Hypertext Technology and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF); individuals such as Robert Cailliau and Nicola Pellow; already existing ideas close to the idea of the Web such as Theodor Nelson’s idea of hypertext; already available technologies such as the Internet or other computer networks or software using hyperlinks such as HyperCard, and, in particular, competing hierarchical information systems such as CERN’s internal database CERNDOC, or the global systems WAIS and Gopher.

This brief introduction does not, by any means, pretend to be even an outline of a history of the Web, but nevertheless it is fair to maintain that a catalogue of the defining moments in such a history should probably include the following six moments.

25 years of formation of the Web

The rapid expansion of the Web continued after 1995 – the 10,022 Web sites had become 100,000 Web sites, 6 months later – and when entering the public realm, new actors such as companies and civil society took part in the continuous formation of the Web (for examples of Web sites founded between 1991 and 1995, see the overview, List of websites). From a technological point of view, a number of defining moments can be identified after 1995, for instance, easy-to-use graphical browsers (Mosaic, 1993; Netscape, 1995), Web search engines (from 1995), streaming audio and video (1995/1997), Web feeds enabling the automatic update of information via RSS (1999) and blog software (1998). If one goes beyond purely technological moments, other defining moments would also be relevant, for instance, relating to Internet governance, users, social media, traditional print/electronic media and other issues. From a Web historian’s perspective, what remains is to understand and connect these past events, or, in short, to write histories of the Web.

A comprehensive academic history of the first 25 years of the Web still remains to be written, but within the last decade, elements of such a history have been published, including monographs (e.g. Salter and Murray, 2014), edited volumes (Brügger, 2010a; Burns and Brügger, 2012) and a number of journal articles (cf. the overview in Brügger, 2010b: 8–13). And the literature within the field of Web history continues to grow (Brügger, in press; Brügger et al., in press; Brügger and Schroeder, in press), just as international conferences about Web history have recently been established (e.g. ‘Web Archives as Scholarly Sources: Issues, Practices and Perspectives’ (Aarhus, 2015) and ‘Times and Temporalities of the Web’ (Paris, 2015)). It is possible to argue that today there is a certain ‘ferment in the field’ of Web history, and that shared theoretical and methodological assumptions and discussions are emerging alongside transnational researcher collaborations.

The six articles of this special issue/section add to the growing literature about the formation of the Web in their own particular ways.

The first two articles investigate the discourse surrounding the Web. The focus of the article ‘How the Web was told: continuity and change in the founding fathers’ narratives on the origins of the WWW’ is on the Web’s initial period of formation. Paolo Bory, Eleonora Benecchi and Gabriele Balbi examine the evolution of the ‘narratives of invention’ used by the founding fathers of the Web, including Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, by analysing how keywords and crucial concepts and ideas changed over time.

In ‘The cybercultural moment and the new media field’, Michael Stevenson places the Web in a broader perspective of ‘new media’ by investigating how the Web has been underpinned by discursive constructions of the Web as disruptive, open and participatory, claiming that this discourse was not only there in the beginning, but has also emerged at various points in the Web’s continued formation.

Academic studies of the history of the Web must build on sources, and the Web of the past is one such source. However, since the online Web disappears rapidly, researchers have to rely on that they can find archived Web. In ‘What does the Web remember of its deleted past? An archival reconstruction of the former Yugoslav top-level domain’, Anat Ben-David engages in a methodological discussion of how one can reconstruct the history of a nation by using the Web itself as a primary source, and on top of these methodological reflections, she conducts an empirical study of the history of the top-level domain of Yugoslavia (.yu), which was deleted from the Internet in 2010.

Although the Web is global by nature, its formation always takes place in distinct national settings. Following Anat Ben-David’s analysis of the Web of one nation, the next two articles also adopt a national focus by investigating elements of a national Web history, in both cases with a focus on business on the Web. In ‘This is the future: a reconstruction of the UK business Web space (1996-2001)’, Marta Musso and Francesco Merletti tell the story of the Web space created by British companies between 1996 and 2001, and, among other things, they investigate how many companies opened a Web site, why they did this, and which business sectors were the most active. In addition, the article addresses some of the challenges related to building a Web history by using material in Web archives as the main historical source.

In ‘The “Web of pros” in the 1990s: The Professional Acclimation of the World Wide Web in France’, Valérie Schafer and Benjamin G. Thierry focus on the emergent Web culture in France in the 1990s by studying the ‘Web of professionals’. They study how a new generation of Web entrepreneurs developed, and how the use of their business model marked online practices.

In contrast to the Web, which was linked to commercial use almost from the very beginning, the Internet was widely understood as a tool for scientific research. But this difference should not hide the fact that the Web has also remained embodied in the very fabric of research. How this embeddedness actually took place and evolved within sciences, the social sciences and the humanities is studied by Eric T. Meyer, Ralph Schroeder and Josh Cowls in ‘The net as a knowledge machine: How the Internet became embedded in research’.

The Web in the next 25 years

The impact of the Web on society during the last 25 years cannot be underestimated. But as with any other anniversary celebration, it is relevant to peek into the future and ask whether there will be a Web to celebrate in 25 years’ time. The Web is still here and it continues to develop, but if one takes stock of recent developments, the Web is also challenged by the combination of social media and mobile media such as smart phones and tablet computers. The nexus between the Web, social media and mobile media can be understood as three general waves of development.

The first wave of social media started on and developed with the Web, involving Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and others, and at that time, they added value to the Web and made it expand by linking more and more content to an ever-growing number of users.

The second wave was characterised by social media ‘grafting’ on the newly introduced mobile media platforms, in particular, the smart phone with touch screen, camera and apps. The app is a particular challenge to the Web because of its ease of use, in particular, when combined with social media universes. However, it is relevant to remind ourselves that smart phones also come with Web browsers, so a potential conflict between the two gateways to the Internet – the Web and the app – is built into the smart phone and the tablet.

While in the second wave, the social media that initially originated with the Web have created mobile apps in parallel with their Web universes, the third wave is characterised by the emergence of new social media that are born on and with mobile media, and that are app-based only, most notably Instagram, but also Snapchat and Tinder.

Although the two latter waves are characterised by two competing systems – Web and app – these two systems are also interdependent since they are closely interwoven by a continuous stream of feeds, embeddings and syndication back and forth between the two.

On the threshold to the next 25 years of Web history, the question then is whether mobile media apps will outcompete the Web and make it obsolete. When reflecting on this, it is relevant to bear in mind what an app cannot do – at least not today: an app cannot link out of itself directly to other apps. In other words, apps do not come with external hyperlinks, and in that sense, they mark a return to a pre-Web era when information was stored in confined software and content silos with no direct links between the two. And as long as users want easy access between information systems, the Web’s hyperlink may be the killer app to kill the app and make the Web survive for another 25 years.