International Perspectives – How Did It All Begin? Children and the WWW in the 1990s and early 2000s

Do you remember connecting to the web with a slow dial-up modem and waiting for pictures that took minutes to load? Or drafting an email offline to save money, as being online was expensive. Or maybe you remember sitting in a library, a PC-café or a computer room at your school, accessing a chat room or looking up something related to your hobby? If you were a kid in these memories, your history likely holds great importance in understanding how the web became a part of children’s lives between 1995 and 2005.  

I was 14 years old in 1995. Growing up on a small farm in a working-class family, the web was not part of my childhood. Actually, I don’t remember being online or using email until I entered university in 2001. This lack of online experinces from the ’90 sometimes makes me a bit sad, as I am the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project called WEB CHILD, which investigates  how the introduction of the World Wide Web changed childhoods in South Korea, Denmark and the United States. However, my own (lack of) history with the early web is a good reminder. Even if it is only one small data point in a sea of historical sources, it is a constant cue that even if statistics show that it became a part of 75% of all three countries during its first ten years, the web affected kids’ lives in very different ways—and sometimes not at all. 

But why study the old web at all? 

At first glance, the web you might remember from the late 1990s or early 2000s might not look like the web of today. There was no social media, searching the web often entailed browsing through websites with themed lists of links, and the web was not something you had in your pocket, but was accessed from a big, ugly grey box, until Apple made them cool and colourful. However, the infrastructure that was built at a time when you couldn’t be online because your parents were on the phone is the basis of the web we see today. Its largely unregulated nature, the datafication of children’s lives on digital playgrounds, and the social interaction in digital networks emerged in this period. So did the public debates that simultaneously hail the progress the web will bring to education and lament its negative impact on children. 

Analysing the historical context of the current web’s origins helps us to understand how we ended up where we are today. It gives researchers, parents and others with an interest in digital childhoods a historical backdrop which debunks the argument of ‘inevitability’ that often creeps into current debates about all kinds of technology from social media to AI; it demonstrates that the web we have today could have been, and still can be, very different. 

“The World Wide Web, developed at the European research institution CERN, is today by far the most common way to transfer information on the Internet.”

However, much of the Web’s early development in the form of websites and early search engines happened in the United States, where the technical backbone of the Internet’s infrastructure had been developed since the 1960s. This meant that American neoliberal ideals about free markets, globalisation, and the ‘end of history’ zeitgeist of the 1990s made a significant mark on the web’s early development. And the fact that much of the hardware and software needed to build Web infrastructure was also produced here strengthened the web’s role as a carrier of American world views. Understanding this history helps to challenge any ideas of the web as just neutral technology; it can be changed, regulated, challenged or improved in its current form, just like any other technological manifestation of socio-cultural phenomena. What further strengthens this point is the web’s different trajectory in different countries. 

Childhood and media cultures were very different in 1990s Denmark, South Korea and the United States. As I have shown in my previous research, Denmark was, for instance, much more permissive when it came to ideals for upbringing than the United States. And others have shown that South Korea was much less individually oriented in educational and family settings than was the case in America. In terms of mass-media markets, the influence of the market versus the state also varied to a large degree. But despite these differences, my preliminary research has shown that the introduction of the web sparked a number of similar debates across the three countries, and that children used the web to communicate with their peers from its very beginning. 

These differences and what they meant to different ways children were encouraged to and did use the web, is one of the things we are very interested in. From our preliminary analyses, it seems like commercial influences were much stronger in the development of web offers for kids in the United States, whereas libraries played a big role in Denmark. Education seems to be a very important element in some parts of the early offers made for children, but in South Korea in particular. These differences challenge the idea that the web’s development is natural or can not be directed, as cultural differences and diverse technological infrastructures and frameworks have influenced the development of web offers for children in different ways. 

These differences notwithstanding, there are also interesting similarities. 

One of the public debates of the period that cut across the three countries is the question of children’s computer skills. Children are seen as being very computer savvy, to the point where they are labelled ‘digital natives’, which later became a much criticised term. These perceived skills challenge the child-adult relationship, and parents are told that they will never catch up. In WEB CHILD, we are very interested in this conceptualisation of children as more skilled than adults. We know from other literature that some societies were starting to take children’s opinions more seriously in the 1990s, and as we continue our research, we try to understand what role the introduction of the web played in this context.

When the project finishes in 2030, I hope that our exploration of such fascinating similarities of the web’s influence in very different childhood cultures and their historical circumstances will tell us how the introduction of the web changed childhood in a range of significant ways around the turn of the millennium.