1990's Science and Technology | Internet and Society

Society and the Internet.

In the four years after Netscape Navigator was introduced to the public (between 1994 and 1998), the number of Americans using the Internet increased from five million to sixty-two million, with traffic on the Internet doubling every one hundred days. By 1999 there were more than eleven million domain names registered on the Web, with more than seventy million websites, "www," "@," and "dot com" had become new icons of the so-called Information Age, The Internet was only thirty years old. No other invention had grown so fast to reach so many people. The Internet was a revolution in communications. With e-mail, people could share ideas and information faster and cheaper than through telephones or letters. "Virtual communities" proliferated, with far-flung groups of people with shared interests connecting in chatrooms and newsgroups. Internet users had access to websites all over the world, and with the...