Introduction
A Short History of the Internet and World Wide Web

Purpose

The Internet, the worldwide network of computer networks, has evolved in less than 5 years from a research tool for academics and a hang-out for nerds to a common medium of communication. Today, "the Net" is a huge shopping mall, a major news publishing house, a community center and a place for somewhat computer-savvy people and groups to disseminate information on everything from conspiracy theories and UFO abductions to AIDS education and political propaganda. One group that has received a significant amount of media attention for their presence on the World Wide Web (WWW) is the Zapatista Rebels in Chiapas, Mexico.

The EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) or Zapatista National Liberation Army has used the Internet to circumvent the traditional media in Mexico, which are controlled or at least censored by the government. More importantly, various individuals have taken up the cause of the Zapatistas and are actively disseminating Zapatista-related materials over the WWW. These sites provide both news accounts of the rebel activities, non-governmental eyewitness accounts of the living conditions in Chiapas and analyses of the situation by foreign observers, as well as writings, speeches, and communiqués by the Zapatistas themselves.

In this work I will discuss the use of the Internet by the Zapatistas and, more importantly, the dissemination of Zapatista information by their sympathizers outside of Mexico. Not only do these sites allow for dissident opinions to be heard over the objections of the government; they also provide an invaluable research tool for social and political scientists studying the rebellion and the conditions in present-day Mexico.

Early History

"The time for revolutions has not passed," writes Harry Cleaver in a book on the Zapatista Rebels.[1] One "revolution" that has been discussed ad nauseam in the mid-1990s is the appearance of "new media" -- a rather exaggerated term mainly applied to the Internet, the worldwide network of networks which used to be populated solely by researchers, college students, and the occasional hi-tech company.

The Internet has existed, in one form or another, since the days of the ARPAnet, a military computer network created by the United States Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Cold War days of 1969 with a handful of connected machines. Within the next few years, local research networks such as the University of Hawaii's ALOHAnet were connected to the ARPAnet, and as early as 1973, the first connections were made to overseas locations, specifically to the University College of London (England) and the Royal Radar Establishment (Norway). Naturally, in those days of infancy, very few individuals had access to the machines running this rudimentary Internet, machines which were mostly running one of the rather cryptic early UNIX operating systems. Surprisingly, Queen Elizabeth II was one of the first persons outside the academic and military community to send an e-mail message. The real development of the actual Internet took place in the 1980s when the Net experienced its first true boom with most larger colleges and universities being connected to one of the larger sub-networks. In 1987, the number of "hosts" or connected machines broke 10,000, which seemed like an incredible growth from just fifteen hosts in early 1971. Yet only two years later, the number of machines on the Internet exceeded 100,000. The original ARPAnet, by the late 1980s merely a part or sub-network of the new Internet, ceased to exist in 1990, which also marked the beginning of the true commercial exploitation of the new medium.

source of data: Internet Timeline

More detailed information on the early history of the Internet can be found at the following sites:

• The Internet Timeline -- A listing of the major developments in the history of the Internet from its infancy to the present day.
• A View from Internet Valley -- "A comprehensive and fascinating overview of the philosophy and history of the Internet." - Excite Reviews
• Community Memory -- An e-mail discussion list on the history of "cyberspace"

Most of the Internet development that took place before 1991 were of little concern to anybody outside the still rather small community of those with access to connected hosts. Most software used to access the Internet, such as e-mail programs or the programs that allowed access to the Usenet (the Internet's system of "newsgroups" or bulletin boards) ran on UNIX machines which were still difficult to use and much too expensive for the average individual. People who owned personal computers, purchased computer modems (expensive at that time), and also had the good fortune of being affiliated with a university or research organization could "log on" to the Internet from their homes. Access was text-only and still required knowledge of the rather cryptic system commands of the UNIX operating system. Today, people who were using the Internet regularly in the early 1990s often consider themselves pioneers of "cyberspace" even though the actual computer network is some twenty years older.

Enter the Web

If a revolution requires the participation of large parts of the general population, the true Internet revolution started in 1991 when the World Wide Web (WWW), a new method of accessing data over the Internet, became very popular. The WWW, sometimes just called the Web, was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, a British employee of CERN, the European High Energy Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland. Rather than distributing data solely as computer files or in a simple menu-driven form (Gopher), the WWW uses a method known as hypertext. In hypertext documents, certain words or phrases can have "live" or "hot" links to other documents. This very document is an example of hypertext; all words that are blue and underlined are links to other documents, containing further information related to the underlined phrase. These "hyperlinks" are the essence of documents on the World Wide Web, allowing a user to follow a customized, almost stream-of-consciousness way of reading a document.

The idea of hypertext did not originate with the WWW but follows a tradition of theories on reorganizing the storage and retrieval methods of human knowledge. One of the most influential works in the development of hypertext is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during WW2, called As We May Think. In it, Bush proposed new patterns of organization for the way information is stored, indexed and retrieved.[2] Dealing with the vast amounts of information created by the Manhattan Project, Bush reviewed the "generations-old" methods for accessing scientific research and found them inadequate for modern purposes. In a truly visionary fashion, Bush foresaw many of the late 20th century developments in data entry, storage, compression, and processing. More than that, Bush contended that these advancements would allow data to be organized in a fashion more similar to the way humans actually think, with connections and relations between subject matters:

"[The human mind] operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature." (Bush, Section 6)

In a thought experiment, Bush created a device he dubbed the "memex," a desktop machine with vast information storage and an "associative index" where the touch of a button takes the user from one document to another related source of information. Today's World Wide Web is an almost direct implementation of Dr. Bush's memex, allowing users to "surf" through information following associative links between documents.

What has made the World Wide Web popular in recent years is not only its ease of use and its amazing associative indexing, but especially the character of its content. There is virtually no subject matter which does not get addressed on the Web. Internet "search engines" such as Yahoo or Altavista allow the Internet user to track down sources on any topic imaginable. Naturally, when the business community became aware of the growing number of Web users, it latched onto this new opportunity for advertising and sales. The Internet has truly become a "global village," a place where national boundaries cease to be of importance. A hypertext document at the University of Tennessee can transfer a user with one click to another document, or a multimedia file of pictures, sounds, or moving images, at Vanderbilt University across the state, or just as easily to a document in Kuala Lumpur or Mexico City. It has become impossible to estimate the number of WWW users worldwide since many of the connected hosts, such as computers at libraries, universities, Internet cafés, etc., are used by a large, undetermined number of people. Without a doubt, millions of people use the WWW regularly in the United States and tens of millions use it worldwide.

	It has become a stated priority for the US Government to expand the availability of the World Wide Web -- a term which is synonymous with "Internet" for many -- to all educational institutions and into many more homes and businesses (see the National Information Infrastructure Virtual Library for more information). Many other nations have proclaimed similar goals, and there are optimists who predict that in a very few years Internet connection may become as wide-spread as cable television or even telephone access is today. The advent of WWW-capable TVs (such as those recently introduced by Phillips-Magnavox) and the new breed of "web-computers" (such as SUN Microsystems' JavaStation) make this idea sound less and less utopian.
Web-TV set-top box [3]		Sun's JavaStation [4]

Without a doubt, the Internet, through the development of the World Wide Web, has become a new mass medium. While not nearly as widespread as TV or traditional print media, the Internet has become an arena of news gathering, of serious research, and of recreation. In recent years, the Internet has also become something more: a tool for propaganda, a medium for gathering support for political and social causes, and a virtually censorship-free forum for the exchange of unorthodox and dissident information. Various groups, from political parties to non-governmental organizations, from churches to rebels and freedom fighters, use the World Wide Web to publizise their causes to the world, bypassing the often reluctant or censored traditional media and speaking, in essence, directly and unedited to their target audiences. When the ARPAnet was created, its designers built in an important capability, the ability to route around problems such as downed hosts or destroyed connections. This "routing" was instituted to allow the military network to survive after a limited nuclear attack. This intrinsic feature has survived in today's Internet -- an important characteristic in a network of over 12 million computers. Another, unintended, side-effect of this ability is the fact that the Internet routes around censorship in much the same way it would do in case of actual physical damage. No government can completely control the flow of information on the net without completely destroying it. There can be no effective censorship of the World Wide Web's content, since information need not be stored under the same jurisdiction as that of the intended consumer (as with traditional media). For example, WWW information about political repression in Mexico can be stored on computers in free countries (such as the US), yet be accessed on an on-demand basis by people in Mexico (or other countries in the world) who have computer access to the WWW, because the repressive officials in Mexico have no control over the information storage locations in the US. Certainly governments will try to regulate the flow of information, such as in the decency provisions of the recent Telecommunications Act. Apart from a public outcry, a protracted court battle and a number of feature stories in news magazines, these provisions have not reduced the amount of obscene material available on the Internet; they have merely made content providers somewhat more cautious in protecting their sites from access by minors or caused them to move to other countries with less restrictive laws.

In the following section we will see how the Zapatista National Liberation Army is represented on the World Wide Web. It is certainly interesting to note that this project itself joins the number of web sites which have the Zapatistas as their subject.

Definitions of Terms Used in this Paper

In this paper, a number of technical terms will be used when talking about the Internet and the World Wide Web. For ease of use, some definitions are provided:

[1] See Zapatistas!, Harry Cleaver ed.

[2] The links in this document will take the you directly to the on-line version of the essay. See the bibliography for a reference on the printed version.

[3] Picture taken from Web-TV Homepage.

[4] Picture taken from Sun JavaStation Homepage.