The Internet, a new beginnning for mankind

Being born in 1991, I have never really experienced life without the convenience of the internet. I chanced upon this documentary on Google over the weekend and was really compelled to share it due to how powerful the opening vignette was in proving that the Internet, or rather Google in this case, has changed the way people live their lives and even directly saved lives. It is somehow disappointing to witness that more facts can be found via Google than through consulting people we trust as experts.

However, by perceiving this phenomenon in another way, none of us can deny how powerful the Internet has become as an information seeking tool and how accessible it has transformed the whole world to become. With the internet, it is no longer difficult to communicate with people we care about halfway around the world. We can even have friends in a country we have never visited.

Google is really pivotal in helping the world make sense of an unimaginably large amount of information and it made knowledge limitless to anyone who has the desire to learn. As co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin said, "We are basically expanding people's brains with all the wells of information".

With the Internet and Google, now so much has become public. It is easy for people who do not know you, to learn many things about you. Who you are married to, where do you work, so on and so forth. In the past, private investigators used to be the only way to dig up information you need about someone. Now, it seems you could be your own private investigator. 

However, with convenience comes the lost of privacy. As the video above reveals, with Facebook's change in their terms of service two years ago, people's information would now be considered the property of Facebook, even after they remove themselves from the site. In this sense much of anyone's information is considered in the public domain and can be sold to advertisers at any point.

The Internet also completely changed the education system for the world. Now Institutes utilise e-learning systems like News in Class and show students animated videos in order to aid learning and liven up the learning process, like what Mr. Choy has been doing for us in Com 125 class.

Furthermore, the Internet altered what research means to me and millions of other students around the world, as explained by Jude Carroll in part 2 of the documentary. Research used to be about going to the library, sitting down with a huge stack of books and going through each and every one of them manually. Now, for a lot of students, research means Google. Students are able to read people's research off the web in the forms of e-journals on Google Scholar, Ebsco Host and many other scholarly sites. With this convenience of course comes the problem of plagarism. Ironically, professors now are all savvy enough to trace the source of plagiarised work via Google itself, or sit back and allow safe assign to do the work for them.

Among all the videos consumed in class this week, I found this the most helpful in my understanding of the Internet, its beginnings and its development. I used to think that the Internet and Web were interchangable terms for the same thing. I'm glad I can now tell them apart, and that I now realise the Web is a subset of the Internet. The Internet is basically a collection of computers connected to form a global networked environment, whereas the web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet.

All in all, with the Internet comes extreme connectivity, which may bring us convenience and other immense advantages. However, the Internet may also take away the beauty of many traditional methods of communication such as handwritten letters and the excitement of receiving them in the mail. Thus, it important for all of us to progress with the world and exploit the Internet for its benefits while also combating its depersonalisation by retaining old school methods for when it is appropriate.