ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a media studies perspective on the history and geography of the World Wide Web. It discusses several technologies that shape the topology of the web, particularly hyperlinks. With roots stretching back to the 1940s, hyperlinks evolved over time to create a fundamentally new form of knowledge creation and storage, one widely used today. In the 1990s, Tim Berner-Lee’s new web-based platform rapidly grew into today’s internet using an alphabet soup of acronyms such as HTML, HTTP, and URLs. The chapter takes the reader through the rise of numerous means of surfing the web and the browser wars of the 2000s.
