The internet has been around ever since I can remember, having always been a staple at home and school. I remember playing complex games (with other people), doing homework and sending emails on the computer when I was very young. To me and many millennials with shared experiences the internet we are completely oblivious to when and how it was ever created. During the Coronavirus pandemic it seems as if we can all thank the internet for giving us the ability to continue going to school and our jobs in a virtual format. Also in simpler times, the ability to catch up with friends in family over video services and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. As a semi-recent high school graduate living in a different part of the country from my home (and having friends attending universities all over the U.S.), I have come to really appreciate the internet in making it so much easier in maintain these friendships and pursue my degree (mostly) online. I am also applying for (virtual-internships), these are not cancelled because of platforms such as zoom which is great- still allowing me to work towards my career goals in a safe environment isolated from the fear of contracting the virus.

The internet’s development was a process that spanned over 40 years. In the Video “Who Invented the Internet? And Why?” this was made possible by a group of intelligent scientists with the intention of making a useful platform but had no idea would turn into such a major contribution to the day to day life of people all over the world. These scientists ranged from The U.S., Britain, Switzerland and France.

A popular yet incorrect theory about why the internet was created is that an American security team invented the internet to have an ongoing communication method that could survive a cold war.

The internet came into fruition during the late 1960’s with the help of MIT’s J.C.R Licklider’s and his idea of an ‘intergalactic network. Computer scientists worked on a concept known as “packet switching” which was the transmission of electric data. This method was able to increase the pace on busy networks by splitting up the data being processed and then re-assembling it on the other end. On August 6th, 1991 the web (part of the world wide web) became available to the public thanks to its founder, Timothy Berner’s Lee. His first website was created in Cern, France in August of 1991.

This updated version of the internet contributed to the creation of ARPANET which was a newer method requiring the use of packet switching, giving communication access to a multitude of computers sharing a single network.

Once the internet ‘basics’ were established, people found new and interesting ways to use the internet involving other people and creating communities. Internet message boards became extremely popular during the 1980’s and are still widely used today. Telephone companies saw the array of possibility in using digital communication and different web browsers were discovered and used. Believe it or not, email was ALSO one of these things that only become popular of use during this period which I personally found to be unbelievable. It’s hard to picture what life was like before the internet and everything that came along with it.

My question for the class is; Do you think humanity would find an alternative way to function if the internet shut down (temporarily or permanently)?

Do you think this would change the way we live for the better or worse?

We live in the age of the internet, and it has had a tremendous affect to our lives. It has become something we have became accustomed to and honestly can’t live without. We are connected to the internet 24/7. With the internet, it allows us to stay connected and informed. We are able to communicate, share memories, learn, make money, and many more just from the internet!

Now although the internet is very beneficial in these positive ways, the internet can become extremely dangerous. Due to the fact that the internet is easy accessible it is easy for anyone to have access to it. With this power it gives people to use it however they desire and that is not always a good thing.

Over the past few years the internet has been rising in popularity its becoming a new norm. Most people’s everyday lives solely revolve around the internet. Some are fortunate enough to make a living off of the internet. The internet has had such a global impact both positively and negatively. The internet allows you access to so much information that could help you find anything from, information on your essay for class or a friendly bet you have amongst friends.

Another huge reason the internet has been so positive is it connects so many people all around the world. This can happen in several different ways. The obvious one is social media such as, Facebook, Instagram, twitter, and so many more. Some that are not as obvious is the online gaming industry. This is a very large and upcoming industry. Millions of people play video games and there are even hundred of thousands of people who actually watch other play video games. The online streaming service called Twitch allows you watch some very popular people stream the game that they love and interact and ask them questions. Some might wonder why would people stream their games and have to deal with thousands of people asking them questions and have to respond to them. These streamers are making millions of dollars by playing video games. Viewers can send streamers money as a form of donations to ask their favorite streamer questions or just say what’s up. They also receive money through subscriptions that vary from $4.99 a month to $24.99 a month. Most people would think this is crazy and never donate but these streamers can actually change the lives of many individuals. Some people who feel helpless and alone have nobody to reach out to so they reach out to these streamers and most streamers will talk to you and realize you need someone to talk to. They can brighten up people’s day and give them something to look forward to. This is how streamers build a community. There are negatives to the internet though. There are a lot of helpful people on the internet but there are those they are far from it. Over the years there has been various problems with cyberbullying. With internet being such a private source of communication, bullies use this to their advantage. They will talk bad about people and not see any consequences.

The documentary Digital Nation, talked on how when using the internet you drift into another universe. Rachel Dretzin talked on how her whole family had been engulfed into the universe of the internet. Coming home and its like her family is not there. In some aspects they are not there. When using the internet most people feel like they are in a different world. When scrolling through the internet its almost as if you are in a different would where each post is someone sitting in front of you saying the things they post. I will admit it is very engulfing using the internet but at the same time I cannot imagine life without it. Do you feel like you are engulfed when using the internet?

Even though it is slightly out of date, the information presented and discussed in the PBS documentary, Digital Nation, still holds true today. Over the past 20 years we have seen social media and the internet change almost every aspect of our daily lives. Since this video was made we have seen the impact of this technological crutch that we call the internet. It has slowly became the primary source of communication over the years and is changing how we do our work, how we learn, how we study, how we socialize, and how comfortable we are with ourselves. For most people the first thing they do every morning is check their phone and the last thing before they go to bed is check their phone.

The internet was initially a result of the need for more secure and standardized communication through a decentralized source, in turn allowing for safe and effective communication. Now every single keystroke and movement you make on your computer is recorded and stored by the government, companies, and people around the world as they are trying to learn from this information and use it to their advantage.

The documentary opened my eyes to how addictive and detrimental increased screen time can be if you don’t have self control. It showed us the reality of how much control the internet has on us through multiple perspectives. One of the biggest criticisms I’ve heard is that the internet is making our generation and the newer generations dumb. While being a firm believer of Social Darwinism, I don’t necessarily blame the internet for any negative problems it may have on generations or individuals but I blame the generations and individuals themselves for letting anything bad happen to them. We all have the opportunity to become aware and think for ourselves. The internet has been one of the greatest innovations of all time and will only continue to inspire and produce more innovation as it continues to get better and better.

The creation of the internet was the start of a new intellectual and innovative era in my opinion. Almost everything we know as humans is accessible on the internet. At the click of a button you can search through millions of articles and books to find what you are looking for. At the click of a button you can send a message across the entire country only to receive your reply 30 seconds later. It has created an efficient flow and passage of knowledge across the world that we’ve never seen before. We are capable of more than every because we now get to waste less time searching for an answer or learning something than before.

But at some point you may ask, how much internet is too much internet? How has it began to affect us as a society or as an individual in that society? What can we do to adapt and overcome the negative aspects that come with the internet?

Who would’ve thought that the day would come where we looked to each other and say, “we’re too connected.” In the ever-changing world of technology, the internet has been the vehicle that gears this rapid change in society. Our new normal is becoming countless hours in front of a screen while multitasking between emails, messages, funny videos, and assignments. Researchers wonder how this overconsumption impacts our future generations or better, the world?

In this week’s screening and reading, we dive into the impact the internet has on our children’s minds and the changes society has opted into to keep up with this new technology. In Frontline: Digital Nation producer Rachel Dretzin explores how the Web and digital media have fabricated a new modern culture. A culture where working, learning, comprehending, and connecting with one’s pears has changed dramatically. In this documentary, we see a current student’s world as they undergo their day to day school. Students and professors explain their frustration with remaining concentrated and screen-time health hazards.

In countries like South Korea, which at the beginning of the digital era used the internet as a marketing tactic to refine their image in the modern world, they are receiving backlashes on young adults’ health. In today’s sense, South Korean has moderated its entertainment realm to increased tourism, surged economically, etc. With that change, it has increased students’ internet access. There are plenty of pop-up PC gaming rooms around South Korean, allowing 24hr access to fast speed internet and computers for guests to play for hours. While many students think it’s a great time waster to escape the intensive world of school and life for a moment, it has lead to a crazy health hazard. Cases have surfaced of students dying after going hours in gaming marathons with a lack of food and water, and the strain screen-time has on vision and hearing. When the interviewer asked, some of the students filmed if they got their school work done and believe they are addicted. Many students negated the answers as they thought they weren’t addicted but instead just having fun.

Even in America, many students spend countless hours in front of screens that affect their social life and comprehension of the information they are obtaining. Stating to Understanding Mass Media, “There are three important aspects of communication that the Internet has changed, and these have instigated pr the way we connect socially: the speed of information, the volume of information, and the “democratization” of publishing, or the ability of anyone to publish ideas on the web.” (459)

      Because many of today’s students base their day today on the internet for many, they cannot live without it. Even MIT students who’s entire career are based on remaining online tend to catch themselves believing they can “multitask.” Throughout the day, many students are doing work, emailing friends, on Facebook, on a date but ultimately never focusing on one task for too long. Many of these students’ societal climate is highly shallow as they realize that no one is actually listening but instead worrying solely about themselves.

Question: How did you feel when you stepped away from your phone and saw your peers glued to their screens?

I think the internet and social media in general is interesting in terms of my generation. Our relationship with the internet but especially with social media is a completely new concept. We grew up and were coming of age while the internet was also hitting it’s prime. I remember life without smartboards in classrooms but by high school all my classrooms had smartboards and full access to the internet.

I liked the part of the textbook that talks about email. At the time and still email is revolutionary, it connected people on a level that wasn’t able to happen before. As a business student, and just a college student , email is my prime source of connecting with people. I liked this quote from the textbook “The speed and relatively inexpensive nature of e-mail makes it a prime competitor of postal services—including FedEx and UPS—that pride themselves on speed.” I never thought about email being a competitor of postal services because I grew up with email being popular. Thinking about it though I guess it would make sense that it cut down their profits. I think I would compare it to nowadays uber and lyft vs taxi’s. I was in high school when uber was coming up and taxi drivers were upset by it, but now it’s so normal that kids growing up will probably not know about the fight taxi and uber went through.

Going on to the social media part of the textbook, I always think it’s funny how the older generation complains how my generation is attached to their phones. Phones make life easier, plain and simple so why would I not want to use it. I would say my phone, and in turn internet and social media are essential to daily life now. Essential because I can check my work schedule and any changes  need to be noted, I can check on my email and school work to stay on top of that, along with staying in contact with my family who don’t live in the area. I have my bank information on my phone and my venmo which I need incase I need to transfer money around. On top of that I also can text my friends and check my social media and have my entertainment.

The internet has become a place where we as humans can post anything we want. There are huge barriers stopping anyone from doing what people want to do on the internet. You as a person can decide in what direction you want your content to go in weather positive or negative. This can effect more than just how the world looks at you, it can also effect how the world looks at the people look around you. Sense the internet became a huge thing that almost everyone uses everyday it has allowed people to connect in ways that we couldn’t image not being connected to now. This can now effect your job prospects, who you become friends with, or who you can date.

Digital Nation talked about how we as humans are now connected to our screens and how this affects our lives on a scale never thought of. The movie discussed how we are never on the same kind of plane of existence when we are on our technology device. We are now in a age of multi tasking everything that we do and never fully putting our time into the work we do now.

We are a society now that depends on short and quick information. We want to get as much information as quickly as we can so we are not wasting our own time. This can even be more seen on sites such as YouTube that have prioritized shorter films so people can get their fill rather than long informative videos that allow you deep dives into the information of the video. I have see how this has effected my own life from me being succumb to this as well preferring short videos more often than longer ones so I can watch even more. I believe this trend needs to end so people can get more time into what they care about rather small bits of information that they can get. This is something we need to work on as a society as we become ever more ingrained into our phones and other technology devices.

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)

Ever since the beginning of the internet and especially social media, there has been serious censorship with many different images and topics. As technology and electronics become more and more accessible to the point where everyone has a screen in their pockets, censorship has become more and more of a problem. This reoccurring blocking of information has become almost invisible to the public and most people don’t even realize its happening to them. Now more than ever more secret information has coming out from under the surface of media. More and more people are starting to see the truth through the screen and are able to see real problems in the world.

In the Ted Talk we were assigned to watch they discussed how the censorship not only affected the bigger people, but also the people who are paid to do the censoring. When livestreams come up where people are attempting to commit suicide repetitively, they also begin to feel suicidal thoughts and even end up committing suicide. The censorship of the media has a toll on everyone involved. When the public is being censored from the truth, the truth gets blurred and twisted. In the past censoring wasn’t as bad as it is today because social media was a newer platform of the internet and was always changing and shifting. Nowadays there is censorship and almost everything. I know personally I didn’t know much about the world and other world conflicts and troubles until recently when the group Anonymous came out again for the Black Lives Matter movement and started to unveil more truth. There is still some censorship with the tweets they post but i have already learned so much more than what i had known before. Before when i would scroll through social media i would only see funny memes or relatable posts or pictures of friends, but now my feed is full of videos and images of people suffering and revolting all over the world. I know some censorship is necessary in media especially for children, but we deserve to know the truth about the world and the conflicts that happen within it. Why does someone get to decide what we see and when, shouldn’t that be our decision? It’s our lives isn’t it. It only affects us if we choose to let it. If we do get the chance to choose what we see, is that better? To be in your own personal bubble secluded from the rest of the world?

Do you think the censorship in the media is necessary? Or should we be able to decide what we see or not see?

When we think of the internet, we just think of a million computers connected to each other ran by other computers. But, that is not necessarily the case. There are lots of things that are posted to the internet and immediately taken down for explicit content, and that’s not done by computers. It is done by people. These people determine what goes on the internet and what does not. But, what makes what they allow and what they don’t the right decision.

Lots of inappropriate and explicit images and videos are attempted to be uploaded to the internet everyday and these people decide whether posting it would be appropriate for people to view or not. They have to take into account young children seeing these images and videos and also adults. If a video is posted about a murder, it could help the law find the person who murdered the other person, but the down side is a young child could see this gruesome video and it could possible effect what they think is ok and could attempt murder later on because they just see the video. They will not look up to see if that person was charged with first degree murder or any charges at all. Why do these people get to decide what we see and what we do not. It is almost like a digital dictatorship. Some of the things that they do not allow us to see could spread awareness about the certain struggles of another country.

Not only does this effect the minds of the internet viewers, but also the people deciding if it should be posted or not. These people view these images everyday affecting their own minds and giving them different disorders such as anxiety, stress, PTSD, etc. They are in more danger because there is no one monitoring what they see. They have to see literally everything that is posted and they have to decide what the rest of the world sees.