Interviewer: It's just a tool, though, isn't it?
Bowie: No, it's not... no, it's an alien life form [laughs]. It's just arrived from Mars.
1998?
Pre-1997, the internet and the web were both very confidential. It started to become a thing in the public mind around that time, and seeing it, in 2000 (apparently the proper date of the interview) as an alien life form is very insightful.
However, it was not "confidential" in 1996. That is simply a ridiculous statement.
I'm a tech head (learned programming in elementary school in the 80's) that grew up in a non technical family, and I discovered the internet, as most people, around 1996, when the TV news started talking about "the information highways".
From the perspective of the Time magazine reading consumer middle class, yes, the internet just arrived fully formed, with only Compuserve and its ilk as hobbyist forerunners with hardly more uptake than CB or ham radio.
Me and my classmates were well-aware of the Internet before that. I remember browsing for FastTracker 2 samples my second year in highschool (1995 that must've been).