In the 1980s, if someone had asked a friend how they kept in touch with a classmate, that friend would have responded "by phone" or "by mail" or perhaps "not often enough." In the 1980s, if someone wanted to find a movie review, they looked in the newspaper; a recipe, they looked in a cookbook; the sports scores, they turned their television to ESPN. Today, the way people do some or all of these things is likely to be drastically different, yet all are variations on a theme: "used e-mail," "looked it up on the Internet," "did a search on Yahoo," or "went to ESPN.com to get the score." The common theme, "the Internet" or "the web," is arguably one of the most potent political, economic, and social forces created in the twentieth century.

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