Towards a Conceptual Definition of the Internet as a Communications Media

The academic field of communications continues to face several challenges related to its disciplinary development. From an epistemological perspective, the definition of its object of study presents a still unfinished conceptual elaboration which would have made possible a more solid reflection vis-a-vis the new technologies that enable communicative acts in the framework of the media. This article seeks to provide elements that may strengthen this category in view of the Internet as an innovation that offers unprecedented possibilities for interactive communication not only due to the space-time compression it entails, but also to the rhizome structures through which information flows. It argues that the Internet is a communications media with unknown possibilities for expression and dissemination, based mainly on the social uses of hypertextual foundation which facilitates the operation of one of the most frequently used communication environments: the World Wide Web.