| The Internet was spawned as ARPAnet in 1969, by a Pentagon doomsday plan to keep U.S. military computers operating in the event of a nuclear war. As ARPAnet grew outwards to span the entire globe it came to be called the Internet which is today a collection of computer networks linked around the world in a kind of electronic village The power of the Internet, was unleashed in the 1990s by a special application, the World Wide Web, so called for its global reach of retrieving and accessing information on the Internet.; The present dissertation explores the information content in three main types of World Wide Web (WWW) pages--Academic, Government, and Commercial. The study is based on a content analysis of a representative random sample of 1,140 WWW sites.; Based on a methodical content analysis of the WWW pages, the results of the study indicate that Public Relations (21.93%) and Advertising (20.70%) were the dominant information categories for the three types of WWW sites studied. Other information categories were Data Bank/General Information (9.74%), News (9.74%), Service/Product Information (9.30%), Bulletin Board (8.86%), Archives/Exhibits (6.93%), Entertainment (6.84%), Commentary (4.65%), and Miscellaneous/Other (1.32%).; Academic and Commercial WWW pages have a significantly high correlation, r{dollar}sb{lcub}rm s{rcub}{dollar} =.782, in information content, followed by Academic and Government pages, r{dollar}sb{lcub}rm s{rcub}{dollar} =.624. However, the Government and Commercial pages have a low correlation, r{dollar}sb{lcub}rm s{rcub}{dollar} =.345, indicating they offer different information content between themselves.; The study concludes that the World Wide Web, with its global information universe, would be an important part of the information highway by functioning as a citizen information utility that would serve people with a variety of information.; Major events in the growth of the Internet and development of high-technology are documented in the appendices which feature (1) history of the Internet in a nutshell, (2) chronology of commerce on the Internet, (3) the history of high-technology in American politics from 1775 to 1995, (4) the history of Hypertext and Hypermedia, and (5) profiles of principal figures in the development of the Internet and the WWW. The glossary lists concise definition of terms frequently used in the dissertation and widely-accepted computer terminology that have become the parlance of the Internet and the World Wide Web. |
