On the Meaning of the Web as an Object of Study

In a new paper submitted to arXiv, researchers Claudio Gutiérrez and Daniel Hernández present a provocative thesis: the very success of the World Wide Web has caused its meaning as a distinct object of academic study to dissolve. The authors chart the Web's trajectory from a well-defined technological innovation—a system of linked hypertext documents—into the ubiquitous, all-encompassing digital infrastructure that underpins global activity today. This transition, they argue, has created a fundamental problem for the research community originally built around it.

The paper points to concrete symptoms of this dilution, including an ongoing 'identity crisis' within flagship academic gatherings like The Web Conference (formerly WWW) and the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC). As the Web became the background fabric for everything from social networks and e-commerce to AI platforms, the once-cohesive community of Web scientists has fragmented into specialized sub-fields. The authors identify key pressures accelerating this fragmentation, including an 'academic tragedy of the commons,' where too many disciplines now claim the Web, and the disruptive force of modern AI, which both uses and transforms the Web.

Gutiérrez and Hernández conclude that a fundamental, community-wide discussion is urgently needed. The core question is no longer about studying the Web as a specific technology, but about defining what it means to study the universal digital environment it has become. The 4-page paper serves as a call to action for researchers to reconceptualize their field in the face of its own overwhelming success.