The internet is a fast developing, incredibly vast tool. It would be hard to find someone these days who doesn’t use the internet in their day to day life, even children. Growing up, the internet was my source of entertainment other than crafts or playing outside. I grew up playing on websites like Webkinz and Neopets. Even in kindergarten, I was online and experiencing the benefits of the internet, playing with kids from around the states. Eventually, as I got older I used it even more for education and continued to use it for entertainment, just in different ways such as social media. In my high school experience, we used the internet as a tool every single day. Sometimes we would be given a worksheet we need to do research for in order to answer, sometimes something would come up that nobody quite understood and so everyone would grab their phones to search it up. Our society runs on the internet these days and I can’t imagine what would happen if suddenly that wasn’t something that was so easy for us to access.

That brings up the question on are we too reliant on the internet? We’ve become so accustomed to having it, how much of a downfall would happen if it were to leave. This kind of question scares me to an extent, but then I think about how reliant we are on other things such as lighting, fridges, etc. There was a time when those didn’t exist and we ended up being reliant, but we don’t question if that’s good or bad today like I had questioned the internet. I feel like in the future, we will feel the same about it as we do with electricity. It is basically a constant in our lives that we expect to be there, and usually, if it goes down, we only have to spend a couple of days without it, except for the situation of natural disasters.

Another worrying question about the internet is censorship. As discussed in class, a lot of us never realized but there are people who have to censor for the public what is displayed online. They’re forced to watch and see and read the horrible disgusting things that they have to deem are too bad for everyone else to see. But what exactly are they censoring? Should we be worried? While I believe it’s healthy to have some amount of worry and suspicion of censorship, as it could easily be used to censor things not for our well being but instead for someone’s agenda. I also believe that a healthy amount of censorship is needed. Already you see studies and articles about how people are becoming numb to things because with technology today we are fed every ounce of bad news that could happen in a day, every day. Obviously, that doesn’t mean those things should be censored from our view, more we need to learn as people what our limit is, but it does beg the question of could we really handle the raw, uncensored internet. I don’t think we could. People talk about the dark web/deep web all the time and how scary and mysterious it is, I believe that within itself is a glimpse into an uncensored internet. I for one am grateful for not having to see a lot of what is censored, I don’t know if I would be able to use the internet as easily as I do now if it were not.

(no pictures because wordpress literally wouldn’t let me and I’m too tired to do this)