ABSTRACT
Today 70% of American adults are Internet users, according to a national survey conducted during the last month of 2006 (Pew/Internet, 2007a, 2007b). Nonetheless, the term Internet did not become a household word in our culture until America Online (an Internet service provider) and Netscape (a browser service) helped popularize the hypertext-driven World Wide Web (WWW) during the mid-1990s. Prior to these pioneering attempts to commercialize the Internet-use phenomenon in the form in which it is known today, various types of non-hypertext-based Internet networks had existed since the late 1970s and the early 1980s.
