WWW

But the most famous of all these strange changes has certainly come about through the introduction of the spectacularly successful Internet, or WorldWideWeb (WWW). There is something that has come over us so quickly that we have hardly had time to catch our breath and understand what has actually happened. Since we are not philosophizing here, but doing sociological systems theory, it is self-evident that what has happened has happened to communication and on this detour to consciousness. With this I have marked our approach. It is clear that the WWW would not function without a complex technology and that the functioning of this technology has an infrastructural determinant effect on what is then possible as communication, but it should be equally clear that we are not talking about technology here, but about communication. That is, if you like, our genuine sociological right to conceive of something as communication or as a social system. The precise question we are asking is about the social quality of the WWW, and we now benefit from the fact that we have already clarified various terms, i.e., that they are now ready for use.

⇒ Sense