Joanne (and others), as a newbie to the academic study of the Internet, with no tech background, could you explain to me what difference between the two is? Up till now, i've commonsensically used "the Internet" to denote, essentially, everything that i can access or receive and anyone i connect with when i "go online" (connect my computer to data that is not on my computer's harddrive). In other words, i've used "the Internet" to denote the sum of all that's online. I've always assumed commonsensically that "the world wide web" simply denotes the network of computers that are "online" (all or part of the time). Since what's online has to rest (or am i missing some basic tech fact?) on some computer, and since to access what's on a particular computer, that computer needs to connected to other computers, "the World Wide Web" and "the Internet" as i understood their meaning refer to the same referent. also, up till now i also thought of "cyberworld" as an a term interchangeable with the other two terms, but that leaves me with no term to denote the "life-world" of people online, as distinguished from "the Internet" as defined above. Could "cyberworld" be used to denote this "life-world", or will that be another gross carelessness with definitions (i can almost feel Thomas Hobbes standing behind me getting ready to slap me ... ) thanks, Reuven Shlozberg Political Science University of Toronto
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reuven shlozberg