Infinity Journal of Digital Content

The Evolution of Digital Content: From Hypertext to Generative AI

Digital content has passed through at least five overlapping regimes in eighty years: the associative hypertext imagined by Bush and Nelson; the document web of Berners-Lee; the participatory, user-generated web popularised as "Web 2.0"; the platformised, algorithmically curated attention economy of mobile video and the creator industries; and, since roughly 2020, a generative regime in which large language and diffusion models can produce plausible text, images, audio and video at near-zero marginal cost. This narrative review synthesises peer-reviewed research, seminal texts and authoritative institutional reports across communication studies, information science, the learning sciences, psychology and machine learning to trace that evolution and to assess what each regime has meant for knowledge, trust, learning and wellbeing. Particular attention is paid to educational and edutainment uses of video, to the Indian context of cheap mobile data and vernacular audiences, to the evidence on misinformation and its correction, and to the contested debate on adolescent wellbeing. The review finds that each regime lowered the cost of producing and distributing content while shifting the scarce resource toward attention, curation and verification. Evidence for strong, uniform harms is weaker and more heterogeneous than public discourse suggests, yet evidence that content environments shape exposure, belief and learning is robust. Generative AI intensifies an existing problem of provenance rather than creating a wholly new one. The article closes with research priorities for 2026-2031 and cautious implications for producers of human-made, verified educational content.

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