ABSTRACT
To begin with, there is no one single field of Internet research. Rather, in the course of the massive worldwide spread of the Internet, social scientific interest in its use and significance has steadily increased and developed independently in different disciplines. By looking at the development of central methodological and epistemological questions, one can gauge the history of the spread and implementation of new Internet technologies. Since the commissioning of ARPANET, a decentralized network originally built per order of the US Air Force for enabling military communication during wartime breakdowns of established channels, the worldwide computer network for electronic communication and information exchange has not merely changed the working and communication practices of the members of scientific and military institutions. The Internet, which emerged from ARPANET and initially connected only scientific institutions with each other, was by the early 1990s facilitating commercial and private use via the WWW. This in turn led to the rapid global spread of Internet access and set a (still ongoing) process in motion, by which an ever-increasing number of people worldwide rely on the Internet as an instrument for the facilitation of everyday life.
