The Internet has brought greater prosperity, allowing not only established business more distribution channels over a wider geographical area but it has also allowed individuals through e-bay, for example, and small independent businesses to flourish. This has brought a lot more choice to ordinary people, and also driven down prices as people find it easier to compare different companies’ products. The main advantage to small businesses is that they can cheaply set up online and find a global market for their goods and services.By making it easier to work anywhere with an Internet connection, the internet has also allowed many more people to work from home and to share projects with co-workers across the whole world which has allowed for greater economic efficiencies.
The Internet has also provided a cheap and wide-reaching platform for independent creative people to share and distribute their work. This is done via self-promotion similar to small business, in the form of digital portfolios and self-hosted blogs as well as sharing content more generally, take for example the vast array of independent movies gets regularly posted to video-hosting websites such as Vimeo. The Internet has given anyone creative equal footing by which to compete as everyone has the potential to reach the same global audience. The Internet has increased economic and creative prosperity in a leveled way.The Internet has brought greater prosperity, allowing not only established business more distribution channels over a wider geographical area but it has also allowed individuals through e-bay, for example, and small independent businesses to flourish.
This has brought a lot more choice to ordinary people, and also driven down prices as people find it easier to compare different companies’ products. The main advantage to small businesses is that they can cheaply set up online and find a global market for their goods and services.By making it easier to work anywhere with an Internet connection, the internet has also allowed many more people to work from home and to share projects with co-workers across the whole world which has allowed for greater economic efficiencies. The Internet has also provided a cheap and wide-reaching platform for independent creative people to share and distribute their work.
This is done via self-promotion similar to small business, in the form of digital portfolios and self-hosted blogs as well as sharing content more generally, take for example the vast array of independent movies gets regularly posted to video-hosting websites such as Vimeo. The Internet has given anyone creative equal footing by which to compete as everyone has the potential to reach the same global audience.The power that the Internet gives to citizens is good for democracyPeople often complain that their opinions are ultimately pointless as nothing will change. This trend can be demonstrated with the numbers of people going out to vote consistently falling, however with the rise of the Internet this trend could reverse.
What the Internet has enabled is for everyone, in one way or another, to have the chance to truly have their voice heard. It has given them the ability to fully engage in topics that matter to them on a personal level. There are websites where people can debate, share opinions, and start petitions in ways that were never truly available before.Not only is democracy being revived, it is also being demanded in countries that do not have democracy due to Internet access. This can be seen in what has been described as the Arab Spring, whereby the Internet was used as a tool to organize pro-democracy protest in a number of Middle-Eastern countries including Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, to name a but a few.
Points for: The quality of information online cannot always be relied upon . Point The Internet has become a major source of information for many people. However, online information has usually not gone through the same checks as newspaper articles, books or factual television programming. There is a higher risk that some of the facts or quotations from a particular source in an article are false. Whereas newspapers might lose customers if people find out they have been ‘selling lies’, a blog and other online content can be easily created and uploaded as well as just as quickly being deleted. If people base their opinions on the information they find online, they could well be basing their opinion on false information.
Since the Internet gives equal space to material of greatly varying quality, the degree to which the internet can been viewed as being a total force for good is drawn into question. If an informed society is an empowered society it therefore stands to reason that a misinformed society is disempowered society. The Internet is a threat to privacyEveryone’s privacy can be greatly harmed by the Internet. Some websites store information. Some ask us to fill in information which can be sold to other sites for commercial purposes. As the Internet gains more and more users the temptation for criminals to gain our private information becomes greater.
Hackers can hide their true location when engaging in illegal activities online, so the likelihood of their being brought to justice is low. Whenever people post something online, it becomes almost impossible to erase, and with the proliferation of social networks posting personal information online is becoming second nature, this is a dangerous precedent. Take for example the posting of our locations online via geotagging, this for many is an action which doesn’t take much consideration, however, to demonstrate the danger of this designer Barry Borsoom setup the website PleaseRobMe.com which would grab geocaching data and tell people when a person’s house was potentially empty.
The degradation of our privacy as a side-result of the Internet should be of great concern, and it is potentially one of the most detrimental effects the Internet could have on society.The Internet has allowed a large amount of criminal, offensive and discriminatory information to be easily accessed. Point The ability for anyone to be able to publish anything online without barriers resulted in a large amount of information which could not only be incorrect but could also be criminal, offensive or discriminatory if it were available to the general public. This sort of information would not usually be widely published via offline channels, but with the advent of the Internet it is very easily accessible by anyone like never before, and this is a dangerous president. A procession of propaganda from extremist groups such as religious zealots or Neo-Nazis for example can be accessed by anyone around the world.This is dangerous as vulnerable people could easily be taken in and exploited if the discovered this material.
It is quite often found that ‘lone-wolf’ terrorists, for example, have gotten their information and inspiration from the Internet. Enabled by 21st-century technology, extremists have optimized the use of Internet chat rooms, Web sites and e-mail chains to spread their virulent messages and reach a global audience of potential recruits. The ability for anyone to publish anything online could clearly do considerable harm to society, which would have otherwise been much less prevalent and easier to control and regulate.
