From the Digital City to the Network Society: Tracing Sociotechnical Imaginaries of the Dutch Web (1994-2004)

This article examines how the meanings of ‘the web’ were constructed and contested in the Netherlands between 1994 and 2004. Drawing on a wide range of public sources, the study identifies four overlapping sociotechnical imaginaries. Each framed the web differently, respectively as civic infrastructure, a state-led modernisation project, speculative engine, and everyday network, and each drew on distinct social groups with unequal reach and institutional authority. Treating public discourse as the primary arena in which the web’s meaning, morality, and materiality were negotiated, the article contributes to the historiography of the early Dutch web and to broader debates in media history about how newly emerging technologies acquire social meaning. The early web in the Netherlands offers a valuable case as an infrastructural frontrunner, positioned at the intersection of American techno-entrepreneurial imaginaries and European policy ambitions, yet largely absent from existing web historiography.