Question - Prepare a one page report on the topic "Impact of Internet on a common man".
Answers
The Internet has turned our existence upside down. It has revolutionized communications, to the extent that it is now our preferred medium of everyday communication. In almost everything we do, we use the Internet. Ordering a pizza, buying a television, sharing a moment with a friend, sending a picture over instant messaging. Before the Internet, if you wanted to keep up with the news, you had to walk down to the newsstand when it opened in the morning and buy a local edition reporting what had happened the previous day. But today a click or two is enough to read your local paper and any news source from anywhere in the world, updated up to the minute.
The Internet itself has been transformed. In its early days—which from a historical perspective are still relatively recent—it was a static network designed to shuttle a small freight of bytes or a short message between two terminals; it was a repository of information where content was published and maintained only by expert coders. Today, however, immense quantities of information are uploaded and downloaded over this electronic leviathan, and the content is very much our own, for now we are all commentators, publishers, and creators.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Internet widened in scope to encompass the IT capabilities of universities and research centers, and, later on, public entities, institutions, and private enterprises from around the world. The Internet underwent immense growth; it was no longer a state-controlled project, but the largest computer network in the world, comprising over 50,000 sub-networks, 4 million systems, and 70 million users.
The emergence of web 2.0 in the first decade of the twenty-first century was itself a revolution in the short history of the Internet, fostering the rise of social media and other interactive, crowd-based communication tools.
The Internet was no longer concerned with information exchange alone: it was a sophisticated multidisciplinary tool enabling individuals to create content, communicate with one another, and even escape reality. Today, we can send data from one end of the world to the other in a matter of seconds, make online presentations, live in parallel “game worlds,” and use pictures, video, sound, and text to share our real lives, our genuine identity. Personal stories go public; local issues become global.
The rise of the Internet has sparked a debate about how online communication affects social relationships. The Internet frees us from geographic fetters and brings us together in topic-based communities that are not tied down to any specific place. Ours is a networked, globalized society connected by new technologies. The Internet is the tool we use to interact with one another, and accordingly poses new challenges to privacy and security.
Information technologies have wrought fundamental change throughout society, driving it forward from the industrial age to the networked era. In our world, global information networks are vital infrastructure—but in what ways has this changed human relations? The Internet has changed business, education, government, healthcare, and even the ways in which we interact with our loved ones—it has become one of the key drivers of social evolution.
Prepare a one page report on the topic
Impact of Internet on a Common Man”.
The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the vector of technologicaltransformation of the Industrial Age. This global network of computer networks, largely based nowadays on platforms ofwireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time,transcending space. The Internet is not really a new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969 (Abbate1999). But it was in the 1990s when it was privatized and released from the control of the U.S. Department of Commercethat it diffused around the world at extraordinary speed: in 1996 the first survey of Internet users counted about 40 million;in 2013 they are over 2.5 billion, with China accounting for the largest number of Internet users. Furthermore, for some timethe spread of the Internet was limited by the difficulty to lay out land-based telecommunications infrastructure in theemerging countries. This has changed with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century. Indeed,in 1991, there were about 16 million subscribers of wireless devices in the world, in 2013 they are close to 7 billion (in aplanet of 7.7 billion human beings). Counting on the family and village uses of mobile phones, and taking into considerationthe limited use of these devices among children under five years of age, we can say that humankind is now almost entirelyconnected, albeit with great levels of inequality in the bandwidth as well as in the efficiency and price of the service.At the heart of these communication networks the Internet ensures the production, distribution, and use of digitizedinformation in all formats. According to the study published by Martin Hilbert in Science (Hilbert and López 2011), 95 percentof all information existing in the planet is digitized and most of it is accessible on the Internet and other computer networks.The speed and scope of the transformation of our communication environment by Internet and wireless communication hastriggered all kind of utopian and dystopian perceptions around the world.
In order to fully understand the effects of the Internet on society, we should remember that technology ismaterial culture. It is produced in a social process in a given institutional environment on the basis of theideas, values, interests, and knowledge of their producers, both their early producers and their subsequent producers. In this process we must include the users of the technology, who appropriate and adapt thetechnology rather than adopting it, and by so doing they modify it and produce it in an endless process ofinteraction between technological production and social use. So, to assess the relevance of Internet insociety we must recall the specific characteristics of Internet as a technology. Then we must place it in thecontext of the transformation of the overall social structure, as well as in relationship to the culturecharacteristic of this social structure. Indeed, we live in a new social structure, the global network society,characterized by the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy.Internet is a technology of freedom, in the terms coined by Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1973, coming from alibertarian culture, paradoxically financed by the Pentagon for the benefit of scientists, engineers, and theirstudents, with no direct military application in mind (Castells 2001). The expansion of the Internet from themid-1990s onward resulted from the combination of three main factors:
The technological discovery of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and his willingness todistribute the source code to improve it by the open-source contribution of a global community ofusers, in continuity with the openness of the TCP/IP Internet protocols. The web keeps runningunder the same principle of open source. And two-thirds of web servers are operated by Apache, anopen-source server program.
Institutional change in the management of the Internet, keeping it under the loose management ofthe global Internet community, privatizing it, and allowing both commercial uses and cooperativeuses.
Major changes in social structure, culture, and social behavior: networking as a prevalentorganizational form; individuation as the main orientation of social behavior; and the culture ofautonomy as the culture of the network society.