Love or loathe the net - you CANNOT avoid it! (Societal Impact of the Internet)

Member Name: Boonoiy

Product:	Societal Impact of the Internet
Date:	05/11/01 (100 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy access, Lots of fun

Disadvantages: Open to abuses

Another weekend has passed and I'm back at work typing away on the internet during my lunch hour. The weekends go by so slowly sometimes as the net is not available to me when I'm at home!

This is my experience with the internet, it's always there on my computer at work and I really miss being able to use it when I'm at home. The 1st point I'm making is that the internet IS ADDICTIVE as you get!

So, how does this impact society? Addictions are never a good thing (except those few who get addicted to works of charity - few and far between) they take people over and do not permit them to get into anything else, with something like the internet, as with video game addictions back in the 80s and early 90s, the addiction affects a person's health and wellbeing as it is incredibly time consuming and entails sitting down, no exercise, for hours on end. The health of the nation can depend on the newest fad and the net allows for a total lack of exercise. Add on to this the convenience of online ordering - everything from pizza to 3 piece suites - and the abitliy to work from home with link-ups to work through modems and yopu've got the ingredients for mass apathy and laziness countrywide!

The net is a great way of meeting people, so I'm told, and such sites as MSN and Yahoo with their chat rooms and anonymous email addresses allow a variety of people to chat and mail without any fear of comeback or recriminations. A great way to meet or a great way to be unsure of who you're really dealing with? The choice is there for users of these sites.

Anonymity - the key to abuse. You can, and many do, get away with all sorts of anti-social rantings and sexual misconucts through the internet, it's very rare that anyone gets caught and the cases of paedophilia and harassment which do make the headlines (Gary Glitter - obvious point) surely represent a minor drop in the ocean of the abusers of the int
ernet.

BUT.

I do not condemn pornography, if I was to do so I would be incredibly small minded and silly, the use of pornography should be accepted by society as an acceptable way of self expression and not condemned in any way, provided that the users are not offending others - i.e. their workmates by using the net for this purpose at work or internet cafe users who have to share workspaces and be made to feel uncomfortable by being confronted with explicit pictures on the next screen - or that the pornographic material they are viewing is not of an abusive nature (kids, rape pictures etc.) The anonymous nature of the internet allows those who wish to partake of such internet sites as are responsible enough to broadcast porn of a high starndard with no breach of liberty without feeling guilty or embarassed for their use of the sites - keeps them from going red in front of the sales assistant in the local newsagents.

The net is a great way to have fun, there are numerous sites dedicated to the lighter side of life, sites such as jokes4u.com send out emails of new jlokes each day and are always good for a laugh, simply type in "Bored" at any of the search engines and you'll get a lot of links to funny sites. The net can be fun as well as serious and, of course, this is why so many of us are on the net.

Education is a huge part of the internet, each university has its own website and there are sites associated with all of the major museums, art galleries, book depositories and archives. The educational benifits of the internet are practically boundless and I found a great deal of help was offered by the net while in my final year of university.

The internet industry - as we're all aware, the net is a medium which provides a great many jobs - web design, maintenance, customer service staff, policeing the net etc. all provide jobs for people accross the globe, without the dotcom industry there would b
e a lot of people out of woerk and the economies of the world would suffer.

Overall:
--------

An unbiased view of the internet states that there are good and bad points to be noted, the good, to me at least, far outweigh the bad. If you manage to get addicted to the net you are in trouble and there is a chance of abuse all around. Internet fraud is abundant although it's being clamped down on, pornography is available to those with thwe passwords and it's possible that many kids will see things that are inappropriate. But, the good points are mulitple: Great way to access many shopping sites (save time), online banking (if your bank guarentees security ONLY!) allows instant access to bank details at all hours, anonymous use of many sites which allow for special interests without judgement being passed, lots of jobs have been created by the develpoment of the net and the world is now at the fingertips of all with a keyboard. The ways to get online are everywhere - from mobile phones with WAP to the huge internet cafes such as easyeverything.

I love the internet and think that it's having a positive impact on society.

Summary: