Is Internet Good or Bad?

RIVER BENDER - June 2012

Having been associated with the Internet long before it became available to the public in the early '90s I'm absolutely in love with it because of the enormous impact it has made on the daily lives of people worldwide. It has changed the way people communicate, learn and play. But surprisingly a recent Rasmussen survey found that only 37% of American adults think the Internet’s impact on culture in this country has been good. Twenty-seven percent (27%) think it has been bad for the country, while 28% say it is neither. Hard to believe?

While the origins of the Internet go back to research in the ‘60s by the U.S. government, it wasn't until the early '90s that it became open to the public and grew as an international network. As of 2011, more than 2.2 billion people, nearly a third of the world's population were using the Internet. Has anything ever gained acceptance to this magnitude?

Let’s first talk about what's good about the Internet and then see if we can determine why some folks are not enamored with it. I'll use my own personal opinions.

First, there's not a day that goes by that I don't receive about 3 dozen email messages and send out about a dozen. If I were allowed only one service of the Internet it would be email. Secondly I would vote on the great search capability of the world wide web, i.e., Goggle and Bing. It is mind boggling that I can find help on just about any topic in seconds. I recall reading in Datamation, a computer magazine in the '70s, how someday we'd be able to dissect a frog online. How simple that sounds today compared to what we can now do with graphics. Besides, who wants to dissect a frog? The third plus I would give the Internet is the incredible rate we transfer data. I recall years ago at AT&T when 1200 bits per second was considered to be about the most reliable rate one could send data almost error free and here we are today transferring data at one million bits per second up to 50 million bits per second and not even mentioning error rate. As a communications engineer that is absolutely fantastic.

So what possibly could anyone find wrong with the Internet? Well, as a starter, if I had young kids today I think I would be concerned with all the pornography that is available and be worried about who my kids might be communicating with. My next worry is the constant news of privacy being compromised by the ever increasing storage of personal data on servers accessible worldwide. While most data is not sensitive important financial and identity data is being used for fraudulent purposes. I'm also not happy with the inaccuracy of much of the information on the Internet since anyone can post anything at practically no cost. Friends constantly send me news by email that is blatantly false and don't even seem to care as long as it agrees with their views. It's also too bad that persons are able to hide behind false identities and have secret conversations with children or scam adults but I'm sure this will eventually be corrected. Some folks argue that the Internet causes people to spend too much time on a computer to the exclusion of social contact. I disagree because my web pages and email correspondence has gained me far more personal real-life contacts than I would have had otherwise.