Late 2008 Macbook - wifi will not turn on.

I am very new to Mac, I have a late 2008 mac book 13 inch running OSX 10.8.4 and it worked fine for a while but shortly thereafter the wifi stopped working all together. It just simply would not turn the wifi on, it would either be an empty wifi symbol up top or it just searches and searches for networks until the computer falls asleep. At any rate, this is very inconvenient for me. I'm not sure if its software, hardware, user error. I am tech savvy enough to answer any questions about whats going on and, believe me, I wouldn't be writing this all out without doing google searches on the issue already. I've just had no luck figuring it out.

Thanks in advance everyone.