Surfing the Web

I remember bringing up what I believed to be an inaccurate translation in a Spanish lesson. "Navegar por Internet" was translated as "To surf the web". "Navegar" sounding too close to "Navigate" to be true aside, this is roughly equivalent to "To browse the web". I wasn't really complaining about the Spanish, but I had to bring up that most people didn't really "surf" the web anymore. If someone says "Navego por Internet", they're probably referring to going on a social media platform or some other samey corporate sites. My immediate interpretation of surfing the net is that you're hopping from site to site, taking something from each one, as a surfer rides waves. There's no plan and surfing is mainly a pastime.

The term surfing was associated with the Internet as far back as 1991, when it was adopted by authors, speakers, and netizens from other technology like the radio and TV. I think the phrase "surf the web" caught on because that's what using the Internet felt like at the time. It was a dynamic experience with seemingly limitless opportunities. The feeling of surfing is quite like that of zooming down the information superhighway. I think the the magic of the 90's Internet has been lost, partially because people have got used to the Internet's existence, and partially because most people today are at best "surfing" Facebook or Tiktok, not the wide world of web. The Internet has been absorbed into everyday life and neither browsing it deliberately nor surfing it haphazardly is a noteworthy activity anymore, nevermind scrolling along one platform.

Does anyone even talk about "web surfing" anymore? I hardly ever hear the term myself, and it seemed old fashioned to me in ~2022. It's difficult to find accurate data on this, because we can only easily access trends in web search or books, not conversation. I looked up "surf the web" alongside similar terms, like "surfing the net" and "Internet surfing", and found basically the same trend. The phrases had become obsolete by the mid-2010s, and people appropriately stopped using them. Terms involving "Internet" instead of "web" and "browse" instead of "surf" dropped off in popularity substantially, but slower than their counterparts.