What image defines the 1990s web? Perhaps it is an "under construction" gif, a "starry night" background or some other fragment of what net artist and scholar Olia Lialina dubbed "a vernacular web" (2005). If not a vernacular, perhaps a sign of an increasingly commercial and professional web – the first banner ad, announcing that this particular information superhighway would be dotted with billboards and shopping malls, or a jutting line graph showing the precipitous rise of the Nasdaq

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... e index. Of course, the answer is both, or all of the above. The 90s web was defined by its contradictions: amateur and professional, playful and serious, free and incorporated. Early descriptions of the World Wide Web's significance oscillated between, on the one hand, an accessible and open alternative to walled gardens like America Online, and on the other hand an electronic frontier ripe for commercialization