[Air-l] Internet vs. WWW

[reuven shlozberg]

Joanne (and others),

as a newbie to the academic study of the Internet, with no tech
background, could you explain to me what difference between the two is?
Up till now, i've commonsensically used "the Internet" to denote,
essentially, everything that i can access or receive and anyone i
connect with when i "go online" (connect my computer to data that is not
on my computer's harddrive). In other words, i've used "the Internet" to
denote the sum of all that's online. I've always assumed
commonsensically that "the world wide web" simply denotes the network of
computers that are "online" (all or part of the time). Since what's
online has to rest (or am i missing some basic tech fact?) on some
computer, and since to access what's on a particular computer, that
computer needs to connected to other computers, "the World Wide Web" and
"the Internet" as i understood their meaning refer to the same referent.

also, up till now i also thought of "cyberworld" as an a term
interchangeable with the other two terms, but that leaves me with no
term to denote the "life-world" of people online, as distinguished from
"the Internet" as defined above. Could "cyberworld" be used to denote
this "life-world", or will that be another gross carelessness with
definitions (i can almost feel Thomas Hobbes standing behind me getting
ready to slap me ... )

thanks, 
Reuven Shlozberg
Political Science
University of Toronto