Given the potential for water and sand damage, the risks associated with bringing your laptop to the beach are not insignificant. Furthermore, you’ll never see a surfer answering emails while paddling their board out into the ocean. So why do we call it “surfing the web” when it’s most often done from homes or coffee shops? The answer is back in the 1980s.
Before it was ever associated with the internet, the verb “surfing” was used in a figurative sense in the context of other technological phenomena. It was borrowed from the sport of surfing to convey performing tasks with fluidity and ease, much like a surfer riding from wave to wave. For instance, the term “channel surfing,” to describe switching between TV channels, appeared in a 1986 article in The Wall Street Journal. And in 1988, futurist writer Paul Saffo wrote about “information surfing,” which is the idea of using computer technology to easily compile information.
The idea of “surfing the internet” made its first known appearance in text in 1992. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest known example as a 1992 online post regarding size limits for text files. Librarian Jean Armour Polly helped popularize the term more widely in the 1992 book Surfing the Internet: An Introduction. These early mentions helped to establish an early definition for the idiom, meaning “to use the internet skillfully and/or competently.”
It wasn’t long until the phrase incorporated synonyms for “internet” (e.g., “surfing the net,” “surfing the web,” etc.). In the case of the word “web,” it comes from the World Wide Web, which was created in 1989. “Web” was chosen to convey interconnectivity between the various sites on the internet (also called “websites”), much like how webs of any kind are woven together using multiple components.
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