Article on " INTERNET-a boon or a name"
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A man needs a fair amount of information to run his life efficiently, and to date the Internet is the most versatile information-provider that man has ever devised. If for nothing else, for that reason alone it thoroughly deserves to be called a boon.
That is not to say that it does not have multiple other uses as well: one can avail of its services to bank, to plan and book holidays, to buy railway or aeroplane tickets, to keep in touch with one’s friends and make new ones, to share one’s thoughts with others and get their feedback on them, to chat, to play online games, to run an individual, social or political campaign, to create one’s own circle of like-minded people … the list is yet to be exhausted, but it is surely already large enough to explain why, more and more, people all around the world are getting hooked to the Internet.
There are parents who complain that the Internet has swept their children off their feet, so much so that they do not seem to be interested in anything else. They ignore their studies, parents, social responsibilities and even ignore their health by not playing enough outdoor and indoor games. In other words, the Internet can act like an addictive drug.
Is it possible that the same thing was said about television not too many years ago? This is a problem that is more related to the character of the children concerned than with the nature of the Internet. One cannot blame the knife because there are some people who use it to stab other people.
Character-building now seems to have gone out, perhaps because it has become a more complicated subject than it ever was. In a diverse, democratic and globalised society like urban India is today, numerous value systems overlap, and it is difficult to bring up children on a single, fixed set of values. It may have been possible once; it is not so now.