ABSTRACT
In the last decade of the twentieth century networked computers became an increasingly visible part of contemporary life. Before 1990 the Internet served primarily as an e-mail and file-transfer system for academics and researchers across the United States. By the middle of the decade the fabric of this medium had undergone two significant changes: commercial use, once forbidden across the US-based backbone, had begun to outpace academic use; and, with the growing popularity of the World Wide Web (WWW), a graphical, hypertextual interface (point-and-click) became the dominant cybernetic vehicle for navigating Internet sites. By 1999 Internet access had penetrated everyday life in America and elsewhere around a networked globe. While we have hardly reached universal access – and ‘the Web’ is hardly worldwide – website URLs have become as common as trademark logos in the commercial world, and email has far surpassed the US Postal Service in number of daily correspondences. Perhaps, then, the 1990s will best be remembered as the ‘cyberspace decade’. In the US city of Wilmington DE, at least, the 1990s have already been declared the ‘dot.com decade’ or, in the words of Paul Levinson of Fordham University: ‘the information decade … It’s only been in the ’90s that we’ve paid attention to information as a commodity’ (Vejnoska 1999: B1). True, the word ‘cyberspace’ first appeared in the 1980s science fiction work of William Gibson (most notably his 1984 novel Neuromancer), but it was not until the 1990s that it became a powerful cultural trope – first in America and then spreading virally elsewhere.1 The network of computers that we call the Internet maintained a phenomenal growth rate throughout the 1990s, from around 300,000 ‘host sites’ at the start of the decade to more than 72 million by January 2000 (Internet Software Consortium 2000). But this material expansion alone cannot account for the increasing presence of networked computers in elementary and secondary schools in the US, or the appearance of Internet kiosks and electronic
coffee shops worldwide. Nor can it account for the explosive growth of capital investment in Internet companies (and, more generally, e-commerce) during 1998 and 1999.2 While the discussion of an immersive virtual information space may have sounded to many like speculative science fiction ten years ago, the explosion in the number of users who have since invested real time, real energy, and real capital into the Internet has very much made cyberspace a social, cultural and economic reality.
