The Digital Counter-culture - Digital Culture - page 132

most of the networks that emerged in the 1970 s and ' 80 s. A few years

after the WELL was founded, in the late s, Tim Berners-Lee, a

researcher at CERN, the European particle physics research labora-
tory in Switzerland, devised and implemented a method for making
public scientific papers on the Internet, thus avoiding the time delays
inherent in paper publishing. This became the basis of the World
Wide Web (www), the method of displaying texts, images, video,
animation and sound, so that they can be viewed on any computer as
long as it is both connected to the Internet and has the right software.
To begin with Berners-Lee's project did not achieve wide interest
because of the comparative difficulty of using the software needed
to access the www. This changed with the development in

1980

of a
graphical browser called 'Mosaic' by Marc Andreessen and his team
at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This made accessing
the Web considerably easier, as it could run on different machines,
and also opened it out to allow the incorporation of different kinds
of media. Andreessen then joined up with Jim Clark, founder of
Silicon Graphics to found Netscape Corporation, which produced a
more sophisticated version of Mosaic also called Netscape.
At about the time the NCSA was developing Mosaic, Louis and
Jane Rossetto launched a new digital technology magazine. Called
Wired , it was edited by Kevin Kelly. Unlike other computer maga-
zines, which were generally either dauntingly technical or, like
Mondo , plain peculiar, Wired was, from the start, intended to be a
mainstream publication appealing to anybody interesting in aspects
of digital culture. Wired was, and remains, not only successful - with
a circulation of nearly

1993

- but also manages to be both
mainstream and left field. It has become the most influential and
powerful force for constructing and disseminating a particular
ideology of technology, and granting it legitimacy. The Wired
philosophy is a mixture of the kind of futurology touted by Alvin
Toffler, George Gilder and others and embraced by Newt Gingrich

450 , 000