how i use the internet essay

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800 Words Essay On Internet in English for Students

The internet has transformed the world in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. It has revolutionized how we communicate, access information, conduct business, and even how we entertain ourselves. The internet has become an integral part of our daily lives, and it’s hard to imagine a world without it.

At its core, the Internet is a vast network of interconnected computers and servers that allows for the exchange of information and data across the globe. It was originally conceived as a way for researchers and scientists to share information and collaborate on projects, but it has since evolved into a ubiquitous platform that has permeated every aspect of modern life.

One of the most significant impacts of the internet has been on communication. Before the internet, communication was limited by geography and time zones. People had to rely on physical mail, telephone calls, or face-to-face meetings to communicate with one another. The internet has made communication instantaneous and borderless. With the rise of email, instant messaging, video conferencing, and social media platforms, people can communicate with each other from anywhere in the world, at any time.

The internet has also revolutionized the way we access information. In the past, people had to rely on physical libraries, books, and other printed materials to access information. Today, with the internet, a wealth of information is available at our fingertips. From online encyclopedias to news websites, academic journals, and online databases, the internet has made it possible to access information on virtually any topic imaginable.

Another significant impact of the internet has been on the economy and the way we conduct business. The rise of e-commerce has made it possible for businesses to reach a global market and sell their products and services online. Online shopping has become increasingly popular, and many traditional brick-and-mortar stores have had to adapt to this new reality by establishing an online presence.

Furthermore, the internet has enabled the rise of the gig economy, where people can work as freelancers or contractors for multiple clients and projects simultaneously. This has created new opportunities for individuals to earn a living and has allowed businesses to access a global talent pool.

The internet has also had a profound impact on education. Online learning platforms and distance education programs have made it possible for students to access educational resources and attend classes from anywhere in the world. This has opened up new opportunities for people who may not have had access to traditional educational institutions due to geographical or financial constraints.

However, the internet has also brought with it a number of challenges and concerns. One of the biggest concerns is privacy and security. With so much personal information being shared online, there is a risk of data breaches and cyber attacks. Companies and individuals need to be vigilant about protecting their personal information and implementing strong cybersecurity measures.

Another concern is the spread of misinformation and fake news. The internet has made it easier for anyone to publish and share information, regardless of its accuracy or credibility. This has led to the proliferation of fake news and conspiracy theories, which can have serious consequences for individuals and society as a whole.

There is also concern about the impact of the internet on mental health and well-being. The constant exposure to social media and the pressure to curate a perfect online persona can lead to feelings of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. Additionally, the addictive nature of the internet and the constant stream of information can contribute to decreased attention spans and difficulty focusing on tasks.

Despite these challenges, the internet has proven to be an invaluable tool that has transformed the way we live, work, and interact with the world around us. It has opened up new opportunities for communication, education, and economic growth, and has made it possible for people to connect and collaborate in ways that were previously unimaginable.

As we move forward, it is important to address the challenges and concerns surrounding the internet while also embracing its potential for innovation and progress. This may involve implementing stronger cybersecurity measures, promoting digital literacy and critical thinking skills, and encouraging responsible and ethical use of the internet.

In conclusion, the internet has had a profound impact on virtually every aspect of modern life. It has revolutionized communication, education, business, and access to information. While it has brought with it a number of challenges and concerns, the internet has proven to be an invaluable tool that has transformed the way we live and interact with the world around us. As we continue to navigate the digital age, it is important to embrace the opportunities that the internet provides while also addressing its challenges and promoting responsible and ethical use.

Uses of Internet

In the 21st century, the internet has become an indispensable part of our daily lives, revolutionizing the way we connect, learn, work, and entertain ourselves. Its multifaceted uses have permeated every aspect of society, bringing about unprecedented convenience and opportunities.

Communication stands out as one of the internet’s most significant uses. Instant messaging, video calls, and social media platforms have transcended geographical barriers, allowing people to stay connected with friends and family across the globe. The internet has turned the world into a global village, fostering a sense of unity and understanding among diverse cultures.

Education has undergone a remarkable transformation due to the internet. Online courses, tutorials, and educational resources have made learning accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Students can pursue degrees, acquire new skills, and access a wealth of information at their fingertips, democratizing education and breaking down traditional barriers to learning.

The internet has also redefined the way we work. Remote collaboration tools, cloud computing, and virtual offices have become essential components of the modern workplace. This shift has not only increased efficiency but has also opened up new opportunities for freelancers and remote workers, contributing to the rise of the gig economy.

In the realm of information, the internet has become an unparalleled resource. Search engines allow us to access vast amounts of information on any topic imaginable. This democratization of information has empowered individuals, encouraging critical thinking and facilitating informed decision-making.

Entertainment has undergone a digital revolution, with streaming services, online gaming, and social media platforms providing endless avenues for amusement. The internet has not only transformed how we consume content but has also given rise to new forms of artistic expression and creativity.

In conclusion, the internet’s uses are multifaceted and far-reaching, impacting every facet of our lives. From connecting people across the globe to revolutionizing education, work, and entertainment, the internet continues to be a transformative force, shaping the present and influencing the future. As we navigate the digital landscape, it is essential to harness the potential of the internet responsibly, ensuring that it remains a force for positive change in the years to come.

Convenience Due to Internet

The advent of the internet has ushered in an era of unprecedented convenience, transforming the way we live, work, and interact with the world. In our fast-paced lives, the internet has become a cornerstone of efficiency and ease, offering a multitude of conveniences that have reshaped our daily routines.

Communication is perhaps the most obvious and impactful convenience brought about by the internet. Instant messaging, email, and social media platforms have revolutionized the way we connect with others. Whether it’s staying in touch with loved ones, collaborating with colleagues, or reaching out to friends across the globe, the internet has made communication instantaneous and seamless.

The convenience of online shopping has fundamentally altered the retail landscape. With just a few clicks, consumers can browse, compare prices, and purchase a vast array of products from the comfort of their homes. The rise of e-commerce platforms has not only made shopping more convenient but has also introduced the concept of doorstep delivery, saving time and eliminating the need for physical store visits.

Information retrieval has been transformed by the internet’s vast repository of knowledge. Search engines provide instant access to information on any conceivable topic, enabling users to quickly find answers, conduct research, and stay informed. This ease of information retrieval has empowered individuals, making knowledge more accessible than ever before.

The workplace has undergone a paradigm shift with the internet, enabling remote work and flexible schedules. Online collaboration tools, cloud computing, and virtual communication platforms have made it possible for individuals to work from virtually anywhere, reducing the constraints of traditional office settings and commuting.

Entertainment has also become infinitely more convenient through streaming services, online gaming, and digital media platforms. The ability to access a diverse range of content on-demand has given consumers unprecedented control over their entertainment choices, eliminating the need to adhere to fixed schedules or physical media.

In conclusion, the internet has woven a tapestry of convenience into the fabric of our lives. From streamlined communication and effortless online shopping to boundless information access and flexible work arrangements, the conveniences offered by the internet have become integral to our modern existence. As we navigate this digital landscape, the ongoing evolution of internet technologies continues to enhance and redefine the meaning of convenience in our interconnected world.

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Essay On Internet- FAQs

What is internet short essay.

In the modern time, internet has become is one of the most powerful and interesting tools all across the world. The Internet is a network of networks and collection of many services and resources which benefits us in various ways. Using internet we can access World Wide Web from any place.

What is Internet in 150 words?

The internet is the most recent man-made creation that connects the world. The world has narrowed down after the invention of the internet. It has demolished all boundaries, which were the barriers between people and has made everything accessible. The internet is helpful to us in different ways.

What is internet 100 words?

A. The internet, a recent man-made marvel, has brought the world closer. It has shattered all barriers and made everything accessible. The internet serves us in countless ways, from sharing information with people across the world to staying connected with our loved ones.

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Essay on Uses of Internet for Students and Children

500 words essay on uses of internet.

The Internet has become a sensation nowadays. It is something that humans cannot function without anymore. It has occupied a great part of our lives. We use the internet for almost every little and a big task now. It ranges from searching for a job to listening to music.

The Internet has basically made our lives easier and convenient. The world is at our fingertips now, thanks to the internet. When we see how it has changed the scenario of the modern world, we can’t help but notice its importance. It is used in all spheres of life now.

Internet and Communication

The world has become smaller because of the internet. Now we can communicate with our loved ones oceans away. The days of letter writing are gone where we had to wait for weeks to get a reply. Everything is instant now. Even though telephones allowed us to do that, but the cost was too high. The common man could not afford to call people overseas because of the costs.

However, the internet changed that. Communicating with people both near and far is now easy and affordable. We can send them emails and chat with them through instant messaging apps. We may also video call them using the internet which allows us to see them clearly even though we are miles away.

Furthermore, we can now get instant news updates from all over the world. The moment anything takes place anywhere in the world, we get to know about it. In addition, we are informed about the natural calamities within the correct time. Moreover, we can easily contact our job recruiters using the internet. Job application has been made so much easier through the internet.

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Internet and Entertainment

Entertainment and the Internet go hand in hand now. Everything is at your fingertips to enjoy. You can book movie tickets easily on the internet. Gone are the days of waiting in long queues to get the ticket for the latest movie. It can all be done through the comfort of your home. Similarly, you can also book match tickets and concert tickets without going through the hassle of standing in long lines.

In addition, we can now do all our shopping online. You won’t have to go out in the harsh weather to shop for stuff. The Internet allows you to browse through a large assortment of products with all the details given. It ranges from something as small as a mug to a laptop, you can have it all. Furthermore, you may also filter the categories to find exactly what you are looking for within seconds.

Nowadays, web series are quite a hit amongst the youth. They do not watch TV anymore; rather they enjoy the web series. Various platforms have created shows which they release on the internet that has a major fan following. You can get your daily dose of entertainment from the internet now. Whether you want to hear the latest music, you don’t have to spend a hefty amount to buy the CD. You can simply listen to it on the internet.

Thus, we see how the internet has changed and made our lives easy in various ways. We can connect with our loved ones easily and get access to unlimited entertainment instantly.

FAQs on Uses of Internet

Q.1 How does the internet help in communicating?

A.1 We can now communicate with our loved ones using the internet. We can video call them and connect with our relatives living overseas.

Q.2 What does internet offer in terms of entertainment?

A.2 Internet offers us various modes of entertainment. We can watch movies and shows online. We can also book tickets and shop for products online.

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Essay on Internet Uses For Students

500 + words internet essay.

The internet is described as a global network of computer systems interconnected and following the internet security protocol. However, have you ever considered why the internet is important? This 500+ Words Essay on internet advantages and disadvantages will help students ace essay writing during exams.

A combination of high-end science and advanced technology, the internet is a viral invention. Here, in an essay on the internet, students can learn about the uses and impact of the internet.

Why the Internet Is Important

The internet has undergone significant development from the time of its birth to the present. Over a period of time, the internet has become more interactive and user-friendly. It has also helped man in day-to-day transactions and interactions. The Internet is widely used for numerous functions such as learning, teaching, research, writing, sharing content or data, e-mails, job hunting, playing games, listening to music, watching videos, exploring and finally surfing the internet. Meanwhile, though it makes life easy for people, the internet also comes with a lot of pros and cons. Find the advantages and disadvantages of the internet from this essay.

Also read: History of Internet

Essay on Advantages of Internet

Read this essay on internet advantages to know the effects of using the internet. Look for the points mentioned below.

• The internet has helped reduce the usage of paper and paperwork to a large extent by computerising offices, schools, NGOs, industries and much more.
• Internet helps to provide updated information and news from all over the world
• Education, business and travel have been thriving with the growth of the Internet
• The internet is of high educational and entertainment value
• The internet makes access to public resources, libraries and textbooks much easier
• The internet makes it easy by reducing the time and energy taken to do work
• Work has become more efficient, quick and accurate
• Meetings and conferences are made easier with video calls and other brilliant tools

Apart from all these, as mentioned in the above paragraph on Internet uses, it helps carry out banking activities, exchange information, shop for various goods and more.

Essay on Internet Disadvantages

Despite the use of the internet and its positives, there are also some internet disadvantages. Continuous use of the internet can affect our lifestyle and health. Let us check out the disadvantages of the internet from this paragraph.

• Over-dependence on the internet can lead to many health problems
• People tend to spend more of their productive time doing nothing but browsing
• Even if the internet is now used extensively at work, overuse of the internet could lead to depression
• Quality time with friends and relatives is primarily reduced due to the use of the internet
• Cybercrime has also increased as internet security and privacy are compromised

Thus, we have seen the uses of the internet and its impact on students and working professionals. While we know that overuse of the internet should be avoided, we also have to acknowledge that the internet has still not been exploited to its full potential, despite its massive growth. In conclusion, we can state that to make internet use more comfortable and pleasurable, school students should be taught about the pros and cons of using the internet, thus ensuring that they can stand up against cybercrime and ensure safety.

Also Read: Social Media Essay | Essay on Women Empowerment | Essay On Constitution of India

Frequently asked Questions on Internet Essay

What is the internet.

The internet is a global system of interconnected computers and this system uses a standardised Internet Protocol suite for communication and sharing information.

What are the top 5 uses of the Internet?

The Internet is mostly used by people to send emails and to search on any topic. It can be used to download large files. People depend on the internet for electronic news and magazines these days. A lot of people, especially the young generation use it to play interactive games and for entertainment.

What is WiFi?

WiFi is the latest wireless technology used to connect computers, tablets, smartphones and other electronic devices to the internet.

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Uses of Internet Essay

The Internet is one of the modern scientific discoveries that has changed the mode of human life. It is used extensively for several purposes. It could be defined as connecting a network to another network everywhere within the globe through committed routers and servers. Here are a few sample essays on "uses of the internet".

100 Words Essay on Uses of the Internet

200 words essay on uses of the internet, 500 words essay on uses of the internet, uses of the internet, advantages and disadvantages of the internet, my personal experience.

The Internet is a global computer network. The process of connecting two or more computing systems to a cable or modem is called the Internet. The Internet is the only way of replacing data and statistics via computer networking. It could be very easily reachable. To get important information, one seeks it on google if they have an internet connection. Net performs a critical position within the discipline of change and commerce. Currently, e-commerce has emerged as a very popular tool all around the world because anyone can buy whatever they want through online sites without journeying to markets or shopping department stores. It also plays a critical role in training as students can get important information through the net.

The Internet is one thing that we can't imagine our lives without. It is used everywhere. These days, speaking with buddies and relatives residing in overseas lands is no longer a steeply-priced affair, but you can connect to them at just the click of a button. The Internet offers numerous means of verbal exchange with email, social media platforms, net calls, and messengers. You can communicate with your close ones at any time of the day with the assistance of the net.

The Internet is likewise a top-notch source of enjoyment. In today's times, while everybody is busy with their very own lives, the Internet can show to be your pleasant pal. From e-books to films to songs – the whole lot you need for enjoyment is available on the net.

The Internet has also proved to be a boon for business. It has ended up as a platform to sell products in its own country as well as outside the country. Each and everything nowadays is being sold online. The use of the Internet has largely changed the way we travel. You no longer require traveling to the bus stand or railway station and standing in queue for long hours to get your tickets booked, it can be done with a click of a button at the comfort of your home.

The Internet is an essential invention of the modern era. The Internet has various uses, and it has touched the lives of each person. When two computers are connected over the Internet, they can send and receive all kinds of information. Military research projects in the 1960s invented the Internet, it came into existence on 1st January 1983, and since then, the Internet has evolved and become an essential part of our lives.

Information: The Internet is the platform where we can get information about anything through search engines such as Google and Bing.

Communication: The Internet is used to communicate through emails which is the earliest application of the Internet.

Social Networking: People can connect with people from far away in seconds through these social networking sites. Some popular social networking sites are Facebook, Whatsapp, Snapchat, etc.

E-commerce: Amazon and eBay are some e-commerce sites on the Internet that help sell and buy products.

Learning: Many courses are available, and some provide certification, which can help students in their careers.

Entertainment: The Internet provides a wide range of entertainment sources, such as Amazon Prime Video, Youtube, etc., which are used to watch movies and TV serials.

Jobs: provide portals for Job seekers and Job providers.

The Internet has provided us with multiple advantages. For instance, it is a huge source of information because we can easily find information about anything we want to know on the Internet. There are numerous websites. Among such websites, Google is widely used by most internet users. Because the Internet can be used as a store of knowledge, it can be used in teaching-learning programs as well.

Moreover, the Internet can be used for business and the banking sector too. We can find many online shopping websites. Furthermore, we can also find vast usages of the Internet for various purposes. For instance, it has connected people through various social networking sites such as Facebook, Messenger, Gmail, Viber, Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc. These facilities have made the task of communication tremendously easier, faster and cheaper than traditional ones. During the pandemic, the Internet has allowed updating the conventional training device and gives additional assets for analysis; students can take their training in the comforts of their homes.

Through the Internet, one may get answers to all their curiosity. In the education sector, too, it plays a significant role, especially considering the pandemic. They can also browse for classes – lectures at no extra cost through the Internet.

I personally use the internet each day for a wide variety of devices. I use the internet for online banking, bill pay, and to get access to my college work. I am used to watching my favourite series online in my free time with the help of the internet. I use unlimited internet through my phone. The use of the Internet is slowly replacing the use of traditional newspapers. It offers various recreational advantages as well. It can be said that the Internet plays a great role in enhancing the quality of life.

Explore Career Options (By Industry)

• Construction
• Entertainment
• Manufacturing
• Information Technology

Data Administrator

Database professionals use software to store and organise data such as financial information, and customer shipping records. Individuals who opt for a career as data administrators ensure that data is available for users and secured from unauthorised sales. DB administrators may work in various types of industries. It may involve computer systems design, service firms, insurance companies, banks and hospitals.

Bio Medical Engineer

The field of biomedical engineering opens up a universe of expert chances. An Individual in the biomedical engineering career path work in the field of engineering as well as medicine, in order to find out solutions to common problems of the two fields. The biomedical engineering job opportunities are to collaborate with doctors and researchers to develop medical systems, equipment, or devices that can solve clinical problems. Here we will be discussing jobs after biomedical engineering, how to get a job in biomedical engineering, biomedical engineering scope, and salary. 

Ethical Hacker

A career as ethical hacker involves various challenges and provides lucrative opportunities in the digital era where every giant business and startup owns its cyberspace on the world wide web. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path try to find the vulnerabilities in the cyber system to get its authority. If he or she succeeds in it then he or she gets its illegal authority. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path then steal information or delete the file that could affect the business, functioning, or services of the organization.

GIS officer work on various GIS software to conduct a study and gather spatial and non-spatial information. GIS experts update the GIS data and maintain it. The databases include aerial or satellite imagery, latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, and manually digitized images of maps. In a career as GIS expert, one is responsible for creating online and mobile maps.

Data Analyst

The invention of the database has given fresh breath to the people involved in the data analytics career path. Analysis refers to splitting up a whole into its individual components for individual analysis. Data analysis is a method through which raw data are processed and transformed into information that would be beneficial for user strategic thinking.

Data are collected and examined to respond to questions, evaluate hypotheses or contradict theories. It is a tool for analyzing, transforming, modeling, and arranging data with useful knowledge, to assist in decision-making and methods, encompassing various strategies, and is used in different fields of business, research, and social science.

Geothermal Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as geothermal engineers are the professionals involved in the processing of geothermal energy. The responsibilities of geothermal engineers may vary depending on the workplace location. Those who work in fields design facilities to process and distribute geothermal energy. They oversee the functioning of machinery used in the field.

Database Architect

If you are intrigued by the programming world and are interested in developing communications networks then a career as database architect may be a good option for you. Data architect roles and responsibilities include building design models for data communication networks. Wide Area Networks (WANs), local area networks (LANs), and intranets are included in the database networks. It is expected that database architects will have in-depth knowledge of a company's business to develop a network to fulfil the requirements of the organisation. Stay tuned as we look at the larger picture and give you more information on what is db architecture, why you should pursue database architecture, what to expect from such a degree and what your job opportunities will be after graduation. Here, we will be discussing how to become a data architect. Students can visit NIT Trichy , IIT Kharagpur , JMI New Delhi . 

Remote Sensing Technician

Individuals who opt for a career as a remote sensing technician possess unique personalities. Remote sensing analysts seem to be rational human beings, they are strong, independent, persistent, sincere, realistic and resourceful. Some of them are analytical as well, which means they are intelligent, introspective and inquisitive. 

Remote sensing scientists use remote sensing technology to support scientists in fields such as community planning, flight planning or the management of natural resources. Analysing data collected from aircraft, satellites or ground-based platforms using statistical analysis software, image analysis software or Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a significant part of their work. Do you want to learn how to become remote sensing technician? There's no need to be concerned; we've devised a simple remote sensing technician career path for you. Scroll through the pages and read.

Budget Analyst

Budget analysis, in a nutshell, entails thoroughly analyzing the details of a financial budget. The budget analysis aims to better understand and manage revenue. Budget analysts assist in the achievement of financial targets, the preservation of profitability, and the pursuit of long-term growth for a business. Budget analysts generally have a bachelor's degree in accounting, finance, economics, or a closely related field. Knowledge of Financial Management is of prime importance in this career.

Underwriter

An underwriter is a person who assesses and evaluates the risk of insurance in his or her field like mortgage, loan, health policy, investment, and so on and so forth. The underwriter career path does involve risks as analysing the risks means finding out if there is a way for the insurance underwriter jobs to recover the money from its clients. If the risk turns out to be too much for the company then in the future it is an underwriter who will be held accountable for it. Therefore, one must carry out his or her job with a lot of attention and diligence.

Finance Executive

Product manager.

A Product Manager is a professional responsible for product planning and marketing. He or she manages the product throughout the Product Life Cycle, gathering and prioritising the product. A product manager job description includes defining the product vision and working closely with team members of other departments to deliver winning products.  

Operations Manager

Individuals in the operations manager jobs are responsible for ensuring the efficiency of each department to acquire its optimal goal. They plan the use of resources and distribution of materials. The operations manager's job description includes managing budgets, negotiating contracts, and performing administrative tasks.

Stock Analyst

Individuals who opt for a career as a stock analyst examine the company's investments makes decisions and keep track of financial securities. The nature of such investments will differ from one business to the next. Individuals in the stock analyst career use data mining to forecast a company's profits and revenues, advise clients on whether to buy or sell, participate in seminars, and discussing financial matters with executives and evaluate annual reports.

A Researcher is a professional who is responsible for collecting data and information by reviewing the literature and conducting experiments and surveys. He or she uses various methodological processes to provide accurate data and information that is utilised by academicians and other industry professionals. Here, we will discuss what is a researcher, the researcher's salary, types of researchers.

Welding Engineer

Welding Engineer Job Description: A Welding Engineer work involves managing welding projects and supervising welding teams. He or she is responsible for reviewing welding procedures, processes and documentation. A career as Welding Engineer involves conducting failure analyses and causes on welding issues. 

Transportation Planner

A career as Transportation Planner requires technical application of science and technology in engineering, particularly the concepts, equipment and technologies involved in the production of products and services. In fields like land use, infrastructure review, ecological standards and street design, he or she considers issues of health, environment and performance. A Transportation Planner assigns resources for implementing and designing programmes. He or she is responsible for assessing needs, preparing plans and forecasts and compliance with regulations.

Environmental Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as an environmental engineer are construction professionals who utilise the skills and knowledge of biology, soil science, chemistry and the concept of engineering to design and develop projects that serve as solutions to various environmental problems. 

Safety Manager

A Safety Manager is a professional responsible for employee’s safety at work. He or she plans, implements and oversees the company’s employee safety. A Safety Manager ensures compliance and adherence to Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) guidelines.

Conservation Architect

A Conservation Architect is a professional responsible for conserving and restoring buildings or monuments having a historic value. He or she applies techniques to document and stabilise the object’s state without any further damage. A Conservation Architect restores the monuments and heritage buildings to bring them back to their original state.

Structural Engineer

A Structural Engineer designs buildings, bridges, and other related structures. He or she analyzes the structures and makes sure the structures are strong enough to be used by the people. A career as a Structural Engineer requires working in the construction process. It comes under the civil engineering discipline. A Structure Engineer creates structural models with the help of computer-aided design software. 

Highway Engineer

Highway Engineer Job Description:  A Highway Engineer is a civil engineer who specialises in planning and building thousands of miles of roads that support connectivity and allow transportation across the country. He or she ensures that traffic management schemes are effectively planned concerning economic sustainability and successful implementation.

Field Surveyor

Are you searching for a Field Surveyor Job Description? A Field Surveyor is a professional responsible for conducting field surveys for various places or geographical conditions. He or she collects the required data and information as per the instructions given by senior officials. 

Orthotist and Prosthetist

Orthotists and Prosthetists are professionals who provide aid to patients with disabilities. They fix them to artificial limbs (prosthetics) and help them to regain stability. There are times when people lose their limbs in an accident. In some other occasions, they are born without a limb or orthopaedic impairment. Orthotists and prosthetists play a crucial role in their lives with fixing them to assistive devices and provide mobility.

Pathologist

A career in pathology in India is filled with several responsibilities as it is a medical branch and affects human lives. The demand for pathologists has been increasing over the past few years as people are getting more aware of different diseases. Not only that, but an increase in population and lifestyle changes have also contributed to the increase in a pathologist’s demand. The pathology careers provide an extremely huge number of opportunities and if you want to be a part of the medical field you can consider being a pathologist. If you want to know more about a career in pathology in India then continue reading this article.

Veterinary Doctor

Speech therapist, gynaecologist.

Gynaecology can be defined as the study of the female body. The job outlook for gynaecology is excellent since there is evergreen demand for one because of their responsibility of dealing with not only women’s health but also fertility and pregnancy issues. Although most women prefer to have a women obstetrician gynaecologist as their doctor, men also explore a career as a gynaecologist and there are ample amounts of male doctors in the field who are gynaecologists and aid women during delivery and childbirth. 

Audiologist

The audiologist career involves audiology professionals who are responsible to treat hearing loss and proactively preventing the relevant damage. Individuals who opt for a career as an audiologist use various testing strategies with the aim to determine if someone has a normal sensitivity to sounds or not. After the identification of hearing loss, a hearing doctor is required to determine which sections of the hearing are affected, to what extent they are affected, and where the wound causing the hearing loss is found. As soon as the hearing loss is identified, the patients are provided with recommendations for interventions and rehabilitation such as hearing aids, cochlear implants, and appropriate medical referrals. While audiology is a branch of science that studies and researches hearing, balance, and related disorders.

An oncologist is a specialised doctor responsible for providing medical care to patients diagnosed with cancer. He or she uses several therapies to control the cancer and its effect on the human body such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation therapy and biopsy. An oncologist designs a treatment plan based on a pathology report after diagnosing the type of cancer and where it is spreading inside the body.

Are you searching for an ‘Anatomist job description’? An Anatomist is a research professional who applies the laws of biological science to determine the ability of bodies of various living organisms including animals and humans to regenerate the damaged or destroyed organs. If you want to know what does an anatomist do, then read the entire article, where we will answer all your questions.

For an individual who opts for a career as an actor, the primary responsibility is to completely speak to the character he or she is playing and to persuade the crowd that the character is genuine by connecting with them and bringing them into the story. This applies to significant roles and littler parts, as all roles join to make an effective creation. Here in this article, we will discuss how to become an actor in India, actor exams, actor salary in India, and actor jobs. 

Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats create and direct original routines for themselves, in addition to developing interpretations of existing routines. The work of circus acrobats can be seen in a variety of performance settings, including circus, reality shows, sports events like the Olympics, movies and commercials. Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats must be prepared to face rejections and intermittent periods of work. The creativity of acrobats may extend to other aspects of the performance. For example, acrobats in the circus may work with gym trainers, celebrities or collaborate with other professionals to enhance such performance elements as costume and or maybe at the teaching end of the career.

Video Game Designer

Career as a video game designer is filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. A video game designer is someone who is involved in the process of creating a game from day one. He or she is responsible for fulfilling duties like designing the character of the game, the several levels involved, plot, art and similar other elements. Individuals who opt for a career as a video game designer may also write the codes for the game using different programming languages.

Depending on the video game designer job description and experience they may also have to lead a team and do the early testing of the game in order to suggest changes and find loopholes.

Radio Jockey

Radio Jockey is an exciting, promising career and a great challenge for music lovers. If you are really interested in a career as radio jockey, then it is very important for an RJ to have an automatic, fun, and friendly personality. If you want to get a job done in this field, a strong command of the language and a good voice are always good things. Apart from this, in order to be a good radio jockey, you will also listen to good radio jockeys so that you can understand their style and later make your own by practicing.

A career as radio jockey has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. If you want to know more about a career as radio jockey, and how to become a radio jockey then continue reading the article.

Choreographer

The word “choreography" actually comes from Greek words that mean “dance writing." Individuals who opt for a career as a choreographer create and direct original dances, in addition to developing interpretations of existing dances. A Choreographer dances and utilises his or her creativity in other aspects of dance performance. For example, he or she may work with the music director to select music or collaborate with other famous choreographers to enhance such performance elements as lighting, costume and set design.

Social Media Manager

A career as social media manager involves implementing the company’s or brand’s marketing plan across all social media channels. Social media managers help in building or improving a brand’s or a company’s website traffic, build brand awareness, create and implement marketing and brand strategy. Social media managers are key to important social communication as well.

Photographer

Photography is considered both a science and an art, an artistic means of expression in which the camera replaces the pen. In a career as a photographer, an individual is hired to capture the moments of public and private events, such as press conferences or weddings, or may also work inside a studio, where people go to get their picture clicked. Photography is divided into many streams each generating numerous career opportunities in photography. With the boom in advertising, media, and the fashion industry, photography has emerged as a lucrative and thrilling career option for many Indian youths.

An individual who is pursuing a career as a producer is responsible for managing the business aspects of production. They are involved in each aspect of production from its inception to deception. Famous movie producers review the script, recommend changes and visualise the story. 

They are responsible for overseeing the finance involved in the project and distributing the film for broadcasting on various platforms. A career as a producer is quite fulfilling as well as exhaustive in terms of playing different roles in order for a production to be successful. Famous movie producers are responsible for hiring creative and technical personnel on contract basis.

Copy Writer

In a career as a copywriter, one has to consult with the client and understand the brief well. A career as a copywriter has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. Several new mediums of advertising are opening therefore making it a lucrative career choice. Students can pursue various copywriter courses such as Journalism , Advertising , Marketing Management . Here, we have discussed how to become a freelance copywriter, copywriter career path, how to become a copywriter in India, and copywriting career outlook. 

In a career as a vlogger, one generally works for himself or herself. However, once an individual has gained viewership there are several brands and companies that approach them for paid collaboration. It is one of those fields where an individual can earn well while following his or her passion. 

Ever since internet costs got reduced the viewership for these types of content has increased on a large scale. Therefore, a career as a vlogger has a lot to offer. If you want to know more about the Vlogger eligibility, roles and responsibilities then continue reading the article. 

For publishing books, newspapers, magazines and digital material, editorial and commercial strategies are set by publishers. Individuals in publishing career paths make choices about the markets their businesses will reach and the type of content that their audience will be served. Individuals in book publisher careers collaborate with editorial staff, designers, authors, and freelance contributors who develop and manage the creation of content.

Careers in journalism are filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. One cannot afford to miss out on the details. As it is the small details that provide insights into a story. Depending on those insights a journalist goes about writing a news article. A journalism career can be stressful at times but if you are someone who is passionate about it then it is the right choice for you. If you want to know more about the media field and journalist career then continue reading this article.

Individuals in the editor career path is an unsung hero of the news industry who polishes the language of the news stories provided by stringers, reporters, copywriters and content writers and also news agencies. Individuals who opt for a career as an editor make it more persuasive, concise and clear for readers. In this article, we will discuss the details of the editor's career path such as how to become an editor in India, editor salary in India and editor skills and qualities.

Individuals who opt for a career as a reporter may often be at work on national holidays and festivities. He or she pitches various story ideas and covers news stories in risky situations. Students can pursue a BMC (Bachelor of Mass Communication) , B.M.M. (Bachelor of Mass Media) , or  MAJMC (MA in Journalism and Mass Communication) to become a reporter. While we sit at home reporters travel to locations to collect information that carries a news value.  

Corporate Executive

Are you searching for a Corporate Executive job description? A Corporate Executive role comes with administrative duties. He or she provides support to the leadership of the organisation. A Corporate Executive fulfils the business purpose and ensures its financial stability. In this article, we are going to discuss how to become corporate executive.

Multimedia Specialist

A multimedia specialist is a media professional who creates, audio, videos, graphic image files, computer animations for multimedia applications. He or she is responsible for planning, producing, and maintaining websites and applications. 

Quality Controller

A quality controller plays a crucial role in an organisation. He or she is responsible for performing quality checks on manufactured products. He or she identifies the defects in a product and rejects the product. 

A quality controller records detailed information about products with defects and sends it to the supervisor or plant manager to take necessary actions to improve the production process.

Production Manager

A QA Lead is in charge of the QA Team. The role of QA Lead comes with the responsibility of assessing services and products in order to determine that he or she meets the quality standards. He or she develops, implements and manages test plans. 

Process Development Engineer

The Process Development Engineers design, implement, manufacture, mine, and other production systems using technical knowledge and expertise in the industry. They use computer modeling software to test technologies and machinery. An individual who is opting career as Process Development Engineer is responsible for developing cost-effective and efficient processes. They also monitor the production process and ensure it functions smoothly and efficiently.

AWS Solution Architect

An AWS Solution Architect is someone who specializes in developing and implementing cloud computing systems. He or she has a good understanding of the various aspects of cloud computing and can confidently deploy and manage their systems. He or she troubleshoots the issues and evaluates the risk from the third party. 

Azure Administrator

An Azure Administrator is a professional responsible for implementing, monitoring, and maintaining Azure Solutions. He or she manages cloud infrastructure service instances and various cloud servers as well as sets up public and private cloud systems. 

Computer Programmer

Careers in computer programming primarily refer to the systematic act of writing code and moreover include wider computer science areas. The word 'programmer' or 'coder' has entered into practice with the growing number of newly self-taught tech enthusiasts. Computer programming careers involve the use of designs created by software developers and engineers and transforming them into commands that can be implemented by computers. These commands result in regular usage of social media sites, word-processing applications and browsers.

Information Security Manager

Individuals in the information security manager career path involves in overseeing and controlling all aspects of computer security. The IT security manager job description includes planning and carrying out security measures to protect the business data and information from corruption, theft, unauthorised access, and deliberate attack 

ITSM Manager

Automation test engineer.

An Automation Test Engineer job involves executing automated test scripts. He or she identifies the project’s problems and troubleshoots them. The role involves documenting the defect using management tools. He or she works with the application team in order to resolve any issues arising during the testing process. 

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Essay on Internet

• Updated on  
• Oct 1, 2021

With throat-cutting competition, the difficulty level of various competitive exams has increased. Apart from domain-specific knowledge, questions framed in various exams evaluate critical thinking and decision-making ability, reading and writing skills, and  Logical and Analytical Reasoning . It thus has become important to focus on all the components equally. Just like the aforementioned topics, Essay writing is another crucial element of a wide range of entrance tests like IELTS , TOEFL , UPSC exams , etc. The topics for essays can range from Digital India and Economic issues to the role of Education and Women Empowerment . In this blog, we will share some samples of essays on the internet with you!

Uses of Internet Essay

Essay on advantages and disadvantages of internet, tips to write an essay on the internet .

Here are some of the tips which you can follow in order to write an impressive essay on the internet. 

• Your essay on the internet should be clear and concise with appropriate information. 
• Research meticulously before you start writing an essay on the internet.
• Add both, advantages and disadvantages of using it.  
• Write the content in paragraphs. 
• Avoid the use of jargons and slangs. 
• Keep the tone formal. 
• You can also add statistical data.

The internet is a worldwide network of computer networks that connects millions of people in over 150 countries. Using the internet, you can send emails, chat with people, and obtain information on different variety of subjects. 

Internet can be used for multiple purposes including finding information, communicate with people, shop online, manage your finances, etc.

The first workable prototype of internet came in the late 1960s with creation of ARPANET or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. ARPANET used packet switching to allow multiple computers to communicate on a single network.

In order to complete your application process for studying abroad, apart from the basic documents, you also need to submit a personal essay / statement of purpose as it elucidates your motive to take admission in a particular course and university and also shed light on your career goals. It thus needs to be impressive! Take the assistance from the experts at Leverage Edu who will help you write an SOP that will highlight your achievements, purpose and future goals in a very lucid yet impeccable way!

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Essays About The Internet: Top 5 Examples and Prompts

Are you writing essays about the internet? Then, read our guide, including interesting essay examples and writing prompts to get you started. 

The internet is a vast network of billions of computers connecting people virtually worldwide. When you connect to the internet or go online, you can access loads of information and communicate with people from millions of miles away.

The internet has presented groundbreaking benefits to society, such as global, real-time communication, more accessible access to information, and more source of leisure. However, when in the wrong hands, the internet can be a dangerous neighborhood that bustles with criminal opportunities for thieves, stalkers, and murderers.

For inspiration in writing an article about the internet, read our round-up of thought-provoking essay examples and prompts. 

1. Forty Years Of The Internet: How The World Changed Forever by Oliver Burkeman

2. who owns the internet by elizabeth kolbert, 3. a nation of echo chambers: how the internet closed off the world by will leitch, 4. the rise of memes in the internet world by lennlee keep, 5. how to fight lies, tricks and chaos online by adi robertson, 10 writing prompts on essays about the internet, 1. the internet’s benefits to students, 2. dangers of the internet on the youth, 3. how the internet changed how we date, 4. how the internet revolutionized business, 5. safeguarding your privacy online, 6. effects of internet slang on literacy, 7. are bloggers replacing journalists, 8. the internet of things, 9. metaverse: the future of the internet, 10. creating communities online.

“It’s impossible to say for certain when the internet began, mainly because nobody can agree on what, precisely, the internet is. (This is only partly a philosophical question: it is also a matter of egos since several of the people who made key contributions are anxious to claim the credit.”

Burkeman treads the history of the internet through the lens of those who claim to have contributed to its development and arrival on the tech scene. His nostalgic journey interestingly shows how the internet emerged glacially slow, heading toward the dotcom boom not until decades after a successful computer communication experiment initially intended to establish US defense. You might also be interested in these essays about computers .

“The Internet revolution has, indeed, sent heads rolling, as legions of bookstore owners, music critics, and cirrhotic editors can attest. Instead of becoming more egalitarian, the country has become less so: the gap between America’s rich and poor grows ever wider.”

Once envisioned to democratize power to the people, the Internet disappoints as it continues to concentrate power on a few, deepening inequality with graver concerns, such as piracy and fake news.

“We now only have to interact with people who agree with us; if I use Twitter as my primary news source, as so many people do, I can carefully curate my feed to exclude anyone who disagrees with me about anything. (And if someone who slips in there who does, I can call them a horrible person.).”

The essay laments how the internet has isolated us into our echo chambers, leaving our beliefs unchallenged and stripped of world-proven facts on matters as evident as vaccination. Furthermore, because we addictively feed into the positive validation of people who share our opinions, it becomes easy to demonize those who don’t. As such, our society deals with more conspiracy theory believers and spreaders. 

“The internet is still in some ways the Wild West, and putting your meme and your art out in the world requires a certain amount of faith in humanity, diligence and maybe a good rights attorney on retainer.”

An integral part of social media, memes may not mean what we know them to be in the internet age. Instead, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins contends that memes are cultural ideas and customs passed on if worthy of being “meme”-icked. If we go by this definition, memes could date back to early civilizations and even be found in the animal kingdom.

“This kind of viral half-truth is part of the fabric of today’s internet, and the kind of anger it inspired has been turned into a dangerous commodity. It’s cynically exploited by businesses for ad-supported “fake news,” by scammers raising money online, and by authoritarian governments to spread hate and fear.”

The widespread falsehoods being peddled over the internet requires netizens’ heightened vigilance. But Robertson recognizes the struggle always to be vigilant, drawing up a list of practical techniques everyone can use to combat fake news. 

Share your insights and experience on how the internet has expanded your knowledge in a subject matter and helped you complete your academic papers. In addition, you can compare these perks against the difficulties students and researchers had to endure before the birth of the internet. 

Anyone can be a victim on the internet, but kids are most vulnerable to cyberattacks and offenses. So first, cite the most common concerns kids can encounter while surfing online. A few examples you can include are cyberbullying, phishing, predators, and scams. Next, offer kids and parents some helpful safety tips to avoid falling prey to these online traps. 

Critics hate the internet for making dating among the youth an easy game that heavily emphasizes sexual and physical attractions. Do you agree with them? Discuss your feelings on this point. You can also look into how the internet has strengthened relationships, especially long-distance ones, through communication.

In your essay, take a deep dive into how e-commerce has forever changed how we do business, from how we market our products to the skills of employees now sought. Then, lay down the risks and opportunities in e-commerce. Finally, provide expert tips on how businesses, especially small and medium enterprises, can be competitive by conquering the risks online while optimizing profits through the opportunities of a digitally borderless world. 

Privacy is a contentious issue over the internet. Laws on privacy have turned more complex and become doubly challenging to enforce. In this prompt, hammer down the essence of maintaining privacy on the internet. Then, taking off from privacy experts’ recommendations, offer your audience critical steps to ensure they protect their private space and their data when online.

Internet slang is an evolving language created for people to communicate online easily. It has drawn extensive debates on its effects on the future of language and literacy. In your essay, write your insights on internet slang’s negative and positive effects on shaping students’ linguistic views and skills. If you’re a linguistics geek, you might also be interested in discovering how different languages created their internet lingos.

Can blogging meet journalistic standards and be a reliable source of truth? Journalists do not think so, but some contend that blogging is a form of citizen journalism that can legitimately put light on different angles of an event or situation. Answer this question yourself through your essay and dig deeper into the pros and cons of blogs as a source of news. 

The Internet of Things (IoT) — the interconnectivity of devices made possible by the internet — is poised to be the next most significant technological advancement. When writing this essay, explain what part IOT can play in redefining the future. Then, cite its potential real-world applications and how it can revolutionize industries. 

Write about the metaverse and its promises of raising the online experience to the next level. Talk about what your readers can expect and what activities they can do once they enter the metaverse. Then, consider tackling the technologies making the metaverse a reality and the cost of “living” in this virtual space. You may also go so far as to mull over the potential problems the metaverse poses, such as promoting an improved alternate world to escape from reality. 

One of the most significant social benefits of the internet is finding new friends who share the same interests. We can engage with them directly or through forum discussions that strengthen our knowledge of our interests. For this essay, write about online groups and communities you are part of and share how these are helping you learn more while also challenging you to think more deeply to develop your insights and analysis. Want your essay to leave a good, lasting impression on your readers? Check this guide on how to write an argumentative essay . If you’re still choosing an essay topic, read our essay guides on social media and technology .

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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• Internet Essay

Essay on Internet

Introduction.

The Internet is a system of interconnection of computer networks that link several billion devices worldwide. It is a global network of networks that consists of millions of non-public, public, academic, business and government packet-switched networks, joined by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an intensive variety of information resources and services, like applications of the world wide web (www), the infrastructure to support email, peer-to-peer networks for file sharing and telephony. It has become an important part of our life and we cannot live without it. The Internet can be called the discovery of man that has revolutionized his style of working and living.

The Internet was started as the creation of a small band of dedicated researchers and has grown to be a commercial success with billions of dollars of annual investments. It has completely reduced distance, minimized all limitations and made our world relatively a smaller place. The Internet has brought information to our doorstep at the click of a button. The Internet revolutionized the computer and world of communication like never before.

Advantages of Internet

The Internet is replete with countless advantages. It has made possible man’s access to countless websites, information programs, scientific discoveries, global political, social, economic and cultural developments and happenings, libraries, entertainment and much more. 

The Internet boom in India has become one of the major contributors to the economic growth of the country. It has revolutionized the metros, the towns and the villages. The Internet has contributed massively to the employment sector across the country. The need for professionals has increased who would feed the information into the web. Content writing and management, web page designing, Internet advertisements have become booming sectors within the IT industry.

In the education field, learners can coordinate projects with classrooms all over the globe. Students across the globe do research works online and all information related to research is accessible on the web at the touch of a button. Not only for the students, but the Internet has also become an incredible tool for job seekers. 

The Internet is being used for finding people, places or information on any subject. One can use the directory services to search phone books of any country together with zip codes. People are connecting with friends and families by exchanging emails to facilitate letter-writing, keeping down the cost of phone calls.

In the field of travel, cities, towns, states and countries are using the web to post detailed tourist and event information. Travelers can easily find information on weather, maps, timings for events and transportation schedules and buy tickets to various tourists’ spots.

Today the Internet is used for shopping, paying utility bills, credit card bills, admission fees, E-commerce, online banking facility. In the world of marketing and sales, companies are marketing and selling their products and creating brands over the net. 

Patients and doctors keep up-to-date with the latest medical findings, share treatment information and give one another support in medical problems. 

Furthermore, people are also finding partners through matchmaking sites. 

Today, people are doing financial research; trading like buying and selling stock and investing money. 

However, the Internet has some setbacks too, which is a threat to the entire mankind. People, especially youngsters are getting addicted to the Internet and thus causing problems to their health. It is making this generation lazy. Internet hackers are on the rise, creating nuisance in the world of business and communication. There are a lot of thefts, frauds and unscrupulous businesses cropping up that are taking undue advantage of innocent people. Anti-social elements of society and cybercrime are also using the Internet against humanity. 

Internet is a great tool that man has discovered but its wrong use and negative impact must be minimized.

FAQs on Internet Essay

1. What is the Internet?

The Internet is a computerized network of information. It is a system of interconnection of computer networks that link several billions of devices. The global system of interconnected computer networks, popularly known as, the internet brings the internet protocol suite, that is, TCP/IP into use to communicate between networks and devices. This network consists of private, academic, public, government and business networks that range from local scope to global scope linked by technologies including wireless, electronic and optical networking. There is a broad range of information resources and services on the internet. These resources include the world wide web (www), telephony, electronic mails, file sharing, and interlinked hypertext documents.

2. What are the Advantages of the Internet?

The Internet has brought information to our doorstep. It has made possible man’s access to countless websites, information programs, scientific discoveries, global political, social, economic and cultural developments and happenings, libraries, entertainment and much more. The spread of the internet across the globe has increased connectivity, communication, and sharing between people. With the accessibility of all kinds of languages, the internet has now become a hub of information, knowledge, and learning for people of all ages and all backgrounds. Internets also now act as an address book as they provide the contact information of people through social networking websites. The Internet has now also become a platform for selling all kinds of items and making money through it without much investment. Therefore, the internet facilitates business opportunities for many people. The Internet is now also used for entertainment purposes, banking, payment of bills, shopping, donations and funds, cloud computing, and cloud storage. In recent times, we have also seen how the internet has made work from home, collaboration, and access to the global workforce an easy possibility.

3. What are the Disadvantages of the Internet?

Some of the disadvantages of the Internet: people especially, the youngsters are getting highly addicted to the Internet. There are a lot of thefts, fraudulent activities and unscrupulous business happening, which have become a threat to humankind. The main disadvantages of the widespread use of the internet are:

The Internet is an addiction that causes distraction, affects focus and patience, and wastes the time of students when not used for the right purposes.

Bullying, trolling and stalking have now become a common task for people due to the Internet.

The Internet has also increased the crime rates in the country.

There are a lot of spam emails and advertisements that flourish throughout the internet.

Internet is also now made a tool for pornography and violent images.

With the internet, now everyone is connected to their work every time. There is no holiday or family time left now.

Internets have also made identity thefts, hacking, and cheating possible.

It is also a proven fact that since people spend the majority of their time sitting over the internet, it has greatly increased health issues and obesity in people.

People most often end up buying things that they don't need because of exchange policy and net banking.

The Internet is surely not a safe place for children to spend their time.

4. How has the Internet Become a Boon to India?

The Internet in India has made revolutionary changes in the metros, small towns and villages. It has created a plethora of job opportunities. The rise in the use of the Internet has led to the growth of cyber cities, cyber cafes and Internet parlors across the country. The main advantages of the widespread use of the internet are:

The Internet has made connectivity, communication, and sharing of documents and related data very easy.

The Internet is a library of information, knowledge, and learning for people of all ages and from all fields.

The Internet has facilitated online shopping, thereby giving business opportunities to many entrepreneurs.

Apart from business, there are various jobs available over the internet.

With the advent of net banking and mobile banking, the internet has made banking-related jobs easy.

The Internet has now become one of the biggest sources of entertainment with thousands of web series, movies, and shows.

The widespread use of the internet has made work from home job opportunities possible and easy.

It has also grown possibilities of collaboration and access to a global workforce for businesses.

Cloud computing and cloud storage facilities have increased access to data across multiple devices. 

5. How has the Internet made our life easier and convenient?

The widespread usage of the internet in all corners of the world has made our lives more convenient as compared to the times when there was no internet. Earlier, people used to stand in long queues for any of their work whether it was to send letters to their loved ones, book movie tickets, train tickets, flight tickets, or for bank-related work like withdrawing money and depositing money. Now, all this work can be done over the internet without the need to stand in queues and wait. Emails and chat applications have completely stopped the trend of sending letters. Booking tickets for any purpose is now easily done from the comfort of home using a mobile phone or laptop. Also, net banking and phone banking services have minimized the need for a person to go to the bank for any purpose. Surely, the internet has made lives much easier than they otherwise were.

The Climate that Will Change the World

New ai, new jobs, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, louis leakey and human evolution emerging out of africa, featured author, latest book, the internet and education, introduction.

In many ways, it is difficult to discuss any aspect of contemporary society without considering the Internet. Many people’s lives are saturated so thoroughly with digital technology that the once obvious distinction between either being  online  or  offline  now fails to do justice to a situation where the Internet is implicitly  always on . Indeed, it is often observed that younger generations are unable to talk about  the Internet  as a discrete entity. Instead, online practices have been part of young people’s lives since birth and, much like oxygen, water, or electricity, are assumed to be a basic condition of modern life. As Donald Tapscott (2009, 20) put it, “to them, technology is like the air.” Thus, in many ways, talking about  the Internet  and education simply means talking about contemporary  education . The Internet is already an integral element of education in (over)developed nations, and we can be certain that its worldwide educational significance will continue to increase throughout this decade.

That said, the educational impact of the Internet is not straightforward. At a rudimentary level, it is important to remember that well over half the world’s population has no direct experience of using  the Internet  at all. While this is likely to change with the global expansion of mobile telephony, the issue of unequal access to the most enabling and empowering forms of Internet use remains a major concern. Moreover—as the continued dominance of  traditional  forms of classroom instruction and paper-and-pencil examinations suggest—the educational changes being experienced in the Internet age are complex and often compromised. In addressing the topic of “the Internet and education” we therefore need to proceed with caution. As such, this chapter will consider the following questions:

• What are the potential implications of the Internet for education and learning?
• What dominant forms of Internet-based education have emerged over the past 20 years?
• How does the educational potential of the Internet relate to the realities of its use?
• Most importantly, how should we understand the potential gains and losses of what is being advanced?

The Internet as an Educational Tool

For many commentators, the Internet has always been an inherently educational tool. Indeed, many people would argue that the main characteristics of the Internet align closely with the core concerns of education. For instance, both the Internet  and  education are concerned with information exchange, communication, and the creation of knowledge.

The participatory, communal nature of many social Internet applications and activities is aligned closely with the fundamental qualities of how humans learn, not least the practices of creating, sharing, collaborating, and critiquing.

Thus, in light of the Internet’s capacity to allow these activities to take place on a vast and almost instantaneous scale, the educational implications of the Internet are understandably often described in grand terms. Take, for example, this recent pronouncement from Jeb Bush:

The Internet isn’t just a powerful tool for communication. It’s arguably the most potent force for learning and innovation since the printing press. And it’s at the center of what is possibly America’s mightiest struggle and greatest opportunity: How to reimagine education for a transformative era.

(Bush and Dawson 2013)

Beyond such hyperbole, the implications of the Internet for education and learning can be understood in at least four distinct ways. First, is the potential of the Internet to offer individual learners increased freedom from the physical limitations of the  real world . This is often expressed in terms of reducing constraints of place, space, time, and geography, with individuals able to access high-quality learning opportunities and educational provision regardless of local circumstances. The Internet is therefore portrayed as allowing education to take place on an  any time, any place, any pace  basis. Many commentators extend these  freedoms  into a transcendence of social and material disadvantage, with the Internet perceived as an inherently democratizing medium. The ability to support  freer  and  fairer educational interactions and experiences is seen to reflect the Internet’s underpinning qualities as “a radically democratic zone of infinite connectivity” (Murphy 2012, 122).

Secondly, the Internet is seen to support a  new culture of learning —i.e., learning that is based around  bottom-up  principles of collective exploration, play, and innovation rather than  top-down  individualized instruction (Thomas and Seely-Brown 2011). The Internet allows learning to take place on a  many-to-many  rather than  one-to-many  basis, thereby supporting  socio-constructivist  modes of learning and cognitive development that are profoundly social and cultural in nature. Many educators would consider learners to benefit from the socially rich environments that the Internet can support (see Luckin 2010). For example, it is often argued that the Internet offers individuals enhanced access to sources of knowledge and expertise that exist outside of their immediate environment. In this sense, there is now considerable interest in the ability of the Internet to support powerful forms of  situated learning  and digitally dispersed  communities of practice . The Internet is therefore seen as a powerful tool in supporting learning through  authentic  activities and interactions between people and extended social environments.

Thirdly, the capacity of the Internet to support a mass  connectivity  between people and information is felt to have radically altered the relationship between individuals and knowledge. It is sometimes argued that the Internet supports forms of knowledge creation and knowledge consumption that differ greatly from the epistemological presumptions of formal schooling and mass instruction. The networked relationships that Internet users have with online information have prompted wholesale reassessments of the nature of learning. Some educationalists are now beginning to advance ideas of  fluid intelligence  and  connectivism —reflecting the belief that learning via the Internet is contingent on the ability to access and use distributed information on a  just-in-time  basis. From this perspective,  learning  is understood as the ability to connect to specialized information nodes and sources as and when required. Thus being  knowledgeable  relates to the ability to nurture and maintain these connections (see Chatti, Jarke, and Quix 2010). As George Siemens (2004) puts it, learning can therefore be conceived in terms of the “capacity to know more” via the Internet rather than relating to the individual accumulation of prior knowledge in terms of “what is currently known.”

Fourthly, the Internet is seen to have dramatically  personalized  the ways in which people learn—thereby making education a far more individually determined process than was previously the case. The Internet is associated with an enhanced social autonomy and control, offering individuals increased choice over the nature and form of what they learn, as well as where, when, and how they learn it. Education is therefore a wholly controllable aspect of one’s personal life, with the Internet facilitating a  digital juggling  of educational engagement alongside daily activities and other commitments (Subrahmanyam and Šmahel 2011). Indeed, Internet users are often celebrated as benefiting from an enhanced capacity to self-organize and  curate  educational engagement for themselves, rather than relying on the norms and expectations of an education  system .

The Educational Implications of the Internet

All these various shifts and realignments clearly constitute a fundamental challenge to the  traditional  forms of educational provision and practice that were established throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially institutionalized modes of  formal  schooling and university education. For many commentators, therefore, the Internet contradicts the monopoly of state education systems and the vested interests of the professions that work within them. In all of the ways just outlined, the Internet would certainly seem to test established educational boundaries between  ex perts  and  novices , the production and consumption of knowledge, as well as the timing and location of learning. In terms of how education is provided, the Internet is associated with a range of radically different learning practices and altered social relations.

The Internet has certainly prompted ongoing debate and concern within the educational community. On one hand, many educationalists are busying themselves with rethinking and reimagining the notion of  the school  and  the university  in ways that respond to the demands of the Internet age. There have been various proposals over the past decade for the development of educational institutions that are better aligned with the characteristics of Internet-adept learners and online knowledge. As Collins and Halverson (2009, 129) put it, the task of reinventing schools and universities for the Internet age involves not only “rethinking what is important to learn” but also “rethinking learning.” This has seen modes of schooling being developed that are built around the communal creation (rather than individual consumption) of knowledge, in an attempt to imbue learning with a sense of play, expression, reflection, and exploration. The past ten years has seen a rash of ideas from enthusiastic educators proposing the development of new pedagogies and curricula built around social interaction, exploration,  gaming , and  making . All of these proposals for  school 2.0  reflect what Whitby (2013, 9–11) describes as  new models  of education provision based around “openness to learning and masterful tech-savvy.”

However, in contrast to these  re-schooling  proposals has been a countermovement to align the Internet with more radical forms of educational deinstitutionalization. These  de-schooling  arguments have proven popular with groups outside of the traditional  education establishment , framing the Internet as capable of usurping the need for educational institutions altogether. Key concepts here include self-determination, self-organization, self-regulation, and (in a neat twist on the notion of  do-it-yourself ) the idea of  do-it-ourselves . All these ideas align the Internet with a general rejection of institutionalized education—especially what has long been critiqued as the obsolete  banking model  of accumulating  knowledge content . Instead, Internet-based education is conceived along lines of open discussion, open debate, radical questioning, continuous experimentation, and the sharing of knowledge.

As with other aspects of digital activity, education is therefore imagined as something that is now open to reprogramming, modification, and hacking to better suit one’s individual needs.

As Dale Stephens (2013, 9) reasons:

The systems and institutions that we see around us—of schools, college, and work—are being systematically dismantled…. If you want to learn the skills required to navigate the world—the hustle, networking, and creativity—you’re going to have to hack your own education.

These are all highly contestable but highly seductive propositions. Indeed, whether one agrees with them or not, these arguments all highlight the fundamental challenge of the Internet to what was experienced throughout the past one hundred years or so as the dominant mode of education. It is therefore understandable that the Internet is now being discussed in terms of inevitable educational change, transformation, and the general  disruption  of twentieth-century models of education provision and practice. As the noted technology commentator Jeff Jarvis (2009, 210) concluded in an acclaimed overview of the Internet’s societal significance, “education is one of the institutions most deserving of disruption—and with the greatest opportunities to come of it.” Bold statements such as these are now being made with sufficient frequency and conviction that talk of an impending  digital disruption  of education is now rarely contested. Many people, therefore, see the prospect of the Internet completely reinventing education not as a matter of  if , but as a matter of  when .

Prominent Forms of Internet-Based Education

In the face of such forceful predictions of what  will  happen, it is perhaps sensible to take a step back and consider the realities of what has already happened with the Internet and education. As was suggested at the beginning of this chapter, amidst these grand claims of transformation and disruption, it is important to ask how the educational potential of the Internet is  actually  being realized in practice. In this sense, we should acknowledge that the Internet has been long used for educational purposes, and a number of prominent models of Internet-based education have emerged over the past 20 years. Perhaps the most established of these are various forms of what has come to be known as  e-learning —ranging from online courses through to virtual classrooms and even virtual schools. Many early forms of e-learning involved the predominantly one-way delivery of learning content, thereby replicating traditional  correspondence  forms of distance education. These programs (which continue to the present day) tend to rely on online content management systems, albeit supported by some form of interactivity in the form of e-mail, bulletin boards, and other communications systems. Alongside these forms of content delivery is the continued development of so-called virtual classrooms—usually spatial representations of classrooms or lecture theaters that can be  inhabited  by learners and teachers. Often these virtual spaces are designed to support synchronous forms of  live  instruction and feedback, with learners able to listen to lectures and view videos and visual presentations while also interacting with other learners via text and voice. Other asynchronous forms of virtual classroom exist in the form of digital spaces where resources can be accessed and shared—such as audio recordings and text transcripts of lectures, supplementary readings, and discussion forums. These forms of e-learning have continued to be developed since the 1990s, with entire  cyber schools  and online universities now well-established features of educational systems around the world.

While these examples of  e-learning  tend to replicate the basic structure and procedures of  bricks-and-mortar  schools and universities, a variety of other models of Internet-supported education have emerged over the past 20 years. One of the most familiar forms of Internet-based education is the collective  open  creation of information and knowledge, as exemplified by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Despite ongoing debates over its accuracy and coverage, the educational significance of Wikipedia is considerable. As well as being a vast information resource, the ability of users to contribute and refine content is seen to make  wiki  tools such as Wikipedia a significant educational tool. The belief now persists amongst many educators that mass user-driven applications such as Wikipedia allow individuals to engage in learning activities that are more personally meaningful and more publically significant than was ever possible before. As John Willinsky (2009, xiii) reasons:

Today a student who makes the slightest correction to a Wikipedia article is contributing more to the state of public knowledge, in a matter of minutes, than I was able to do over the course of my entire grade school education, such as it was.

These characteristics of wiki tools correspond with the wider  Open Educational Resource  movement which is concerned with making professionally developed educational materials available online for no cost. In this manner, it is reckoned that content from almost 80 percent of courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are available on this free-to-use basis. Similar commitments can be found in institutions ranging from world-class universities such as Yale and Oxford to local community colleges. In all these cases, course materials such as seminar notes, podcasts, and videos of lectures are shared online with a worldwide population of learners, most of whom could otherwise not attend. Crucially (as with Wikipedia), the emphasis of Open Educational Resources is not merely permitting individuals to use provided materials, but encouraging the alteration and amendment of these resources as required. For example, the UK Open University’s extensive OpenLearn project provides free online access to all of the institution’s curriculum materials with an invitation for individual users to adapt these resources as they wish.

Other forms of online content sharing involve the open distribution of educational content that has been created by individuals as well as institutions. For example, the YouTube EDU service offers access to millions of educational videos produced by individual educators and learners. Similarly, Apple Computers’ collection of educational media—the so-called iTunes U—is designed to allow learners to circumvent traditional educational lectures and classes in favor of on-demand free mobile learning (Çelik, Toptaş, and Karaca 2012). Describing itself as “possibly the world’s greatest collection of free educational media available to students, teachers, and lifelong learners,” iTunes U offers free access to hundreds of thousands of educational audio and video podcast files. Most recently, there has been considerable praise for the Khan Academy’s online provision of thousands of bespoke educational videos alongside interactive quizzes and assessments covering a range of subject areas and topics. The aim of Khan Academy is to support individuals to learn at their own pace and to revisit learning content on a repeated basis. This so-called flipped classroom model is intended to allow individuals to engage with instructional elements of learning  before  entering a formal classroom. Face-to-face classroom time can be then be devoted to the practical application of the knowledge through problem solving, discovery work, project-based learning, and experiments (Khan 2012).

Another notable  open  example of Internet-based education has been the development of  MOOCs  (Massively Open Online Courses) over the past five years or so. Now, most notably through successful large-scale ventures such as Coursera and Ed-X, MOOCs involve the online delivery of courses on a free-at-the-point-of-contact basis to mass audiences. At its heart, the MOOC model is based on the idea of individuals being encouraged to learn through their own choice of online tools—what has been termed  personal learning networks —the collective results of which can be aggregated by the course coordinators and shared with other learners. This focus on individually directed discovery learning has proved especially appropriate to college-level education. Now it is possible for individuals of all ages to participate in mass online courses run by professors from the likes of Stanford, MIT, and Harvard universities in subjects ranging from a Yale elective in Roman architecture to a Harvard course in the fundamentals of neuroscience.

Another radical application of the Internet to support self-directed, non-institutional learning are initiatives such as the  hole-in-the-wall  and  School in the Cloud initiatives. These programs are built around an ethos of  minimally invasive education  where children and young people can access digital technology at any time, and teach themselves how to use computers and the Internet on an individually paced basis. The guiding ethos for the original hole-in-the-wall program was to locate Internet access in what Arora (2010, 691) characterizes as “out-of-the-way, out-of-the-mind locations” rather than in formal settings such as schools or universities. Indeed, the program’s credo of minimally invasive education is an avowedly non-institutionalized one, with children expected to engage with the Internet as an educative tool “free of charge and free of any supervision” (Mitra 2010). This approach is seen to be especially applicable to locations such as slum communities in India and Cambodia where Internet access is otherwise lacking. The recent elaboration of the initiative into the School in the Cloud marks an attempt to use online communication tools to allow older community members in high-income countries to act as mentors and  friendly but knowledgeable  mediators to young autonomous learners in lower-income communities. The provision of such access and support is therefore seen to underpin what the project team term “self-organized learning environments” and “self-activated learning”—thus providing an alternative “for those denied formal schooling” in low-income countries (Arora 2010, 700).

These programs, projects, and initiatives are indicative of the variety of ways in which education and the Internet have coalesced over the past 20 years. Yet perhaps the most significant forms of Internet-based education are the completely  informal  instances of learning that occur in the course of everyday Internet use. In this sense the Internet’s implicit support of various forms of  informal learning  could be seen as its most substantial educational impact (see Ünlüsoy et al. 2014). As the cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito has described, there are various different genres of everyday Internet-based practice that can be said to involve elements of learning (see Ito et al. 2009). At a basic level is the popular practice of using the Internet to simply  hang out  with others. Often these forms of  hanging out  can spill over into more focused instances of what Ito terms  messing around —i.e., activities that are interest-driven and more centered on peer sociability, often involving fortuitous searching, experimentation, and playing with resources. This messing around can then sometimes lead to the more intense commitment of what Ito has described as geeking out . These are bouts of concentrated and intense participation within defined communities of like-minded and similarly interested individuals driven by common and often specialized interests. In supporting all these forms of  learning , everyday use of the Internet can be seen as an inherently educational activity.

The Reality of the Internet and Education

These examples—and many more like them—are now seen as proof of the Internet’s growing contribution to what it means to learn and be educated in the twenty-first century. Undoubtedly, developments such as MOOCs, flipped classrooms, and self-organized learning could well turn out to be educational  game changers (Oblinger 2012). Yet the history of educational technology over the past one hundred years or so warns us that change is rarely as instantaneous  or  as totalizing as many people would like to believe. Indeed, the history of  modern  educational technologies (starting with Thomas Edison’s championing of educational filmstrips in the 1910s) has usually been characterized by sets of complex mutually shaping relationships between education and technology (see Cuban 1986). In other words,  new technologies rarely—if ever—have a direct one-way  impact  or predictable  effect  on education. Rather, established cultures and traditions of education also have a profound reciprocal influence on technologies. As the historian Larry Cuban (1993, 185) observed succinctly of the remarkable resilience of schools to the waves of successive technological developments throughout the 1980s and 1990s, “computer meets classroom—classroom wins.” In asking how the Internet is shaping education in the 2010s, we therefore need to also ask the corresponding question of how education is shaping the Internet.

From this perspective, it is not surprising to see the most successful forms of Internet-based education and  e-learning  being those that reflect and even replicate  pre-Internet  forms of education such as classrooms, lectures, and books. It is also not surprising to see the long-established  grammar  of formal education and educational institutions having a strong bearing on emerging forms of Internet-based education (Tyack and Cuban 1995). Take, for instance, the persistence of familiar practices such as dividing knowledge into distinct subject areas, using graded individual assessments, or relying on  expert  teachers. While understandable, these continuities certainly belie claims of radical transformation and disruption of the educational status quo. Thus in contrast to the revolutionary zeal of some commentators, it could be observed that the Internet is having most  impact  on education where it is  not  causing radically new patterns of participation or practice. For instance, rather than extending educational opportunities to those who previously were excluded, the recent rise of the MOOC in countries such as the U.S. and UK appears primarily to be supporting well-resourced, highly motivated, and already well-educated individuals to engage in more education (thereby replicating a trend referred to by some social commentators as the  Matthew Effect ). This is not to say that MOOCs are an insignificant form of education—however, it does suggest that their main  impact  is that of increasing rather than widening educational participation. Indeed, this view does imply that some of the more  radical  claims of social transformation and change that surround MOOCs (and other forms of Internet-based education) require careful consideration.

This leaves any attempts to predict the likely influence of the Internet on future forms of education on uncertain ground. Of course, it is unwise to adapt an overtly cynical view that there is nothing  new  about Internet-based education at all—i.e., that the educational effects of the Internet are simply a case of  old wine in new bottles . Yet it is equally unwise to presume that any of the examples given so far in the chapter necessarily herald a fundamental shift in education. The Internet is certainly associated with educational changes—yet these changes are complex, contradictory, convoluted and decidedly  messy .

In this respect, perhaps the most significant issues that need to be considered about the Internet and education are sociological, rather than technical, in nature.

In this sense, the Internet prompts a range of ideological questions (rather than purely technical answers) about the nature of education in the near future. Thus, as this chapter draws to a close we should move away from the optimistic speculation that pervades most educational discussions of the Internet. Instead, there are a number of important but less often acknowledged social, cultural, and political implications that also merit attention:

1.The Internet and the increased individualization of education

First, then, is the way in which Internet-based education promotes an implicit individualization of practice and action. The Internet is celebrated by many educationalists as increasing the responsibility of individuals in terms of making choices with regards to education, as well as dealing with the consequences of their choice. All the forms of Internet education outlined in this chapter demand increased levels of self-dependence on the part of the individual, with educational success dependent primarily on the individual’s ability to self-direct their ongoing engagement with learning through various preferred means. Of course, this is usually assumed to work in favor of the individual and to the detriment of formal institutions. Yet the idea of the self-responsibilized, self-determining learner is based upon an unrealistic assumption that all individuals have a capacity to act in an agentic, empowered fashion throughout the course of their day-to-day lives. In Bauman’s (2001) terms, the successful online learner is someone able to act as an empowered individual  de facto  rather than an individual  de jure  (i.e., someone who simply has individualism  done to  them). Of course, only a privileged minority of people are able to act in a largely empowered fashion. As such this individualization of action leads to education becoming an area of increased risk as well as opportunity.

These issues raise a number of important questions. For instance, just how equal are individuals in being able to make the educational  choices  that the Internet actually offers? How are the apparent educational freedoms of the Internet resulting in enhanced  unfreedoms  (such as the intensification and extension of educational  work  into domestic settings)? To what extent are  personalized  forms of Internet education simply facilitating the  mass customization  of homogenous educational services and content? What is the nature of the collective forms of Internet-based education? How do  communities  of learners established through the Internet differ in terms of social diversity, obligation, or solidarity? Is the Internet undermining or even eroding notions of education as a public good?

2. The Internet and the growth of data-driven education

Another significant issue related to the increased educational significance of the Internet is the ways in which online data and information are now defining, as well as describing, social life. The Internet has certainly extended the significance of databases, data mining, analytics, and algorithms, with organizations and institutions functioning increasingly through the ongoing collection, aggregation, and (re)analysis of data. Crucially, the Internet allows this  data work  to take place on a mass, aggregated scale. We are now seen to be living in an era of  Big Data  where computerized systems are making available “massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions” (Boyd and Crawford 2012, 662).

The collection and analysis of online data is now a key aspect of how actions are structured and decisions are made in many areas of education. Now, for example, masses of online data are being generated, collected, and collated as a result of the Internet-based activities that take place within educational institutions—ranging from  in-house  monitoring of system conditions to the  public  collection of data at local, state, and federal levels. These data are used for a variety of purposes—including internal course administration, target setting, performance management, and student tracking. Similar processes and practices exist in terms of use of data  across  educational systems—from student databases to performance  league tables . There are, of course, many potential advantages to the heightened significance of online data. There has been much recent enthusiasm for the potential of  learning analytics —i.e., “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs” (Siemens et al. 2011, 4). Similarly, there is growing discussion of  educational data mining  and  academic analytics . All of these uses of digital data are seen to lead to more efficient and transparent educational processes, as well as supporting individuals to self-monitor and  self-diagnose  their learning (Eynon 2013).

Yet, there is a clear need for caution amidst these potential advantages—not least how the increased prevalence of online data in education is implicated in the shaping of what people can and cannot do. For example, how are individuals and their learning being represented by data collected online? How does the Internet support the connection, aggregation, and use of these data in ways not before possible? To what extent are individuals’ educational engagements now being determined by  data profiles ? How are these online data being used in forms of  predictive surveillance  where educators and educational institutions use data relating to past performance and behavior to inform expectations of future behaviors? What aspects of educational engagement are  not  represented in the online data being collected and analyzed?

3. The Internet and the increased commercialization and privatization of education

Thirdly, is the need to recognize the role of commercial and private actors in the growth of Internet-based education. Indeed, the role of the private sector is integral to many of the forms of Internet-based education described in this chapter. For example, it is estimated that the global education/technology market is worth upwards of $7 trillion, with burgeoning levels of private capital investment in online education. A range of multinational commercial interests such as Pearson, Cengage, and McGraw-Hill are now involved heavily in the business of e-learning and online provision of teaching and training—competing with countless smaller commercial concerns and a range of nonprofit organizations. Clearly Internet-based education marks a distinct move away from a  planned economy  model where education provision is largely the preserve of state-run, public-sector institutions (see Picciano and Spring 2013).

Of course, the increased involvement of commercial interests in online education could be seen to have many potential benefits. The private sector is able to focus considerable technological resources and expertise on educational issues. It is often assumed that commercially provided education is more responsive to the demands of its  customers —be it the immediate preferences of learners or the longer-term workforce requirements of business and industry. Moreover, as Chubb and Moe (2012) reason, improvement can arise from market competition between private and public education providers: “in time, [for-profit institutions] may do amazing things with computerized instruction—imagine equivalents of Apple or Microsoft, with the right incentives to work in higher education—and they may give elite nonprofits some healthy competition in providing innovative, high-quality content.” Indeed, the appeal of many of the forms of Internet-based education described in this chapter is predicated upon bringing the innovation of the private sector to bear on the inefficiencies of public education. As Sebastian Thrun (the computer scientist credited with the popularization of the MOOC concept) argued recently: “Education is broken. Face it. It is so broken at so many ends, it requires a little bit of Silicon Valley magic” (Wolfson 2013).

Yet the possibilities for commercial innovation and  magic  notwithstanding, there are a number of reasons to challenge the growing influence of private interests in shaping education agendas in these ways. For example, how committed are IT producers and vendors to the public good of educational technology above and beyond matters of profit and market share? Given that education is an integral element in determining the life chances of the most vulnerable members of society, how appropriate is a Silicon Valley, venture-capitalist mindset of high-risk  start-ups  with expected high rates of failure? What are the moral and ethical implications of reshaping education along the lines of market forces and commercial values? Why should education correspond automatically with the needs of the digital economy?

4. The Internet and the changing values of education

Finally—and perhaps less tangibly—there is also a sense that the Internet might be altering the psychological, emotional, and spiritual bases of education. For example, many of the forms of online education discussed in this chapter imply an increased expansion of education into unfamiliar areas of society and social life—leading to an  always-on  state of potential educational engagement. Indeed, the  anytime, anyplace  nature of online education clearly involves the expansion of education and learning into domestic, work, and community settings where education and learning might previously have not been prominent. There are clear parallels here with what Basil Bernstein (2001) identified as the “total pedagogization of society”—i.e., a modern society that ensures that pedagogy is integrated into all possible spheres of life. This raises questions of what is perhaps lost when one is able to engage with education at all times of the day and in all contexts? Is there something to be said for being able to disconnect from the pressures of education? Is learning best suited to some contexts and circumstances than others?

Many of the forms of online education described in this chapter could also be said to frame learning (often inadvertently) as a competitive endeavor. Thus in contrast to allowing individuals to learn harmoniously alongside others, the Internet could be seen as placing individuals in “personal formative cycles, occupied in unison within individual feedback-action loops. They learn to become industrious self-improvers, accepting and implementing external goals” (Allen 2011, 378). Thus while a sense of achievement at the expense of others may not be immediately apparent, the Internet could be seen as a means of humanizing, disguising, and intensifying the competitive connotations of learning. Continuing this line of thinking, the partial, segmented, task-orientated, fragmented, and discontinuous nature of online education could perhaps even be seen as a form of  spiritual alienation —i.e., alienation at the level of meaning, where  conditions of good work  become detached from the  conditions of good character  (Sennett 2012).

All these points also relate to the correspondences between the Internet and the altered emotional aspects of educational engagement. In particular, many of the forms of Internet-based education described earlier in this chapter (such as the virtual school or the MOOC) could be said to involve learning being experienced on less immediate, less intimate, and perhaps more instrumental grounds. These points were explored in Jonathan Wolff’s (2013) recent reflections on what might be lost when a lecture takes place online as opposed to in a face-to-face lecture theater. While these diminishments are often difficult to pinpoint, Wolff suggested qualities such as the immediacy, the serendipity, and the  real-ness of the live experience  of learning alongside other people. Certainly, the remote, virtual sense of learning online is qualitatively different to the embodied sense of face-to-face learning—both in advantageous and disadvantageous ways.

Conclusions

Whether one agrees with any of these latter arguments or not, it is clear that the topic of “the Internet and education” needs to be approached in a circumspect manner. The predominantly optimistic rhetoric of transformation and change that currently surrounds the Internet and education distracts from a number of significant conflicts and tensions that need to be better acknowledged and addressed. This is not to say that we should adopt a wholly antagonistic  or  wholly pessimistic stance. Indeed, many of the  issues  just outlined should not be assumed automatically to be cause for concern. There are, after all, many people who will be advantaged by more individualized, elitist, competitive, market-driven, omnipresent, and de-emotionalized forms of educational engagement. The Internet clearly works for the millions of people who are learning online at this very moment.

Yet while it may well be that the Internet is helping  some  individuals to engage with education in more convenient, engaging, and useful ways, we would do well to acknowledge that this is unlikely to be the case for all. Any Internet-led changes in education are accompanied by a variety of unintended consequences,  second-order effects , and unforeseen implications. Perhaps the most important point to consider is the well-worn tendency of digital technology to reinforce existing patterns of educational engagement—helping already engaged individuals to participate further, but doing little to widen participation or reengage those who are previously disengaged. In particular, any discussion of the educational  potential  of the Internet needs to remain mindful of the limited usefulness of a  technical-fix  approach to understanding contemporary education. The Internet should not be seen as a ready  solution  to apparent inefficiencies of  twentieth-century  education institutions or practices—it will not lead automatically to more engaged or motivated learners, more highly skilled workforces, or rising levels of national intelligence and innovation. Instead, it is likely that many of the  problems  of contemporary education are primarily social and cultural in nature, and therefore require social and cultural responses.

As such, while there is plenty of scope for the increased use of the Internet within education, any claims for  change  and  improvement  should be seen as contentious and debatable matters, rather than inevitable trends that educators have no choice but to adapt to. To reiterate a key theme that has emerged throughout our discussion, underlying all of the issues raised in this chapter are questions of what sort of future education one believes in. As such, the role of the Internet in improving ,  transforming ,  or even disrupting  education is a deeply complex and ideologically loaded matter that goes well beyond technical issues of how to personalize the delivery of educational content, or support the production and consumption of online content. The future of education may well involve increased use of the Internet—but will not be determined by it.

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Arora, Payal. “Hope-in-the-Wall? A Digital Promise for Free Learning.”  British Journal of Educational Technology  41 (2010): 689–702.

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Bernstein, Basil. “From Pedagogies to Knowledges.” In Ana Morais, Isabel Neves, Brian Davies, and Harry Daniels, eds.,  Towards a Sociology of Pedagogy: The Contribution of Basil Bernstein to Research . New York: Peter Lang, 2001. 363–68.

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Bush, Jeb, and Rosario Dawson. “Internet Brings Historic Shift in Learning.”  Miami Herald , June 25, 2013.  http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/25/3470108/internet-brings-historic-shift.html#storylink=cpy  (accessed September 6, 2013).

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Chatti, Mohammed Amine, Matthias Jarke, and Christoph Quix. “Connectivism: The Network Metaphor of Learning.”  International Journal of Learning Technology  5, no. 1 (February 15, 2010): 80–99.

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The Invention of Internet Essay

Introduction and thesis statement, events that led to the advancement of the internet, effects of advancement of the internet, evolution if the advancement the internet.

Internet is a communication tool that has enabled the entire world to become like a village. This is because with internet people from all corners of the world can reach each other in less than a minute. Internet was invented, and it required people to have computers to get its access.

With internet, people who work or study abroad can talk to their family members almost anytime. This is due to low cost of making telephone calls through the internet (Abbate, 2000). In fact, internet has saved a lot of resources for both individuals and governments.

This is due to the ease of sending and receiving information from their accomplices or business partners from all over the world. For instance, governments used to spend a lot of money in air tickets as their officials went around the world looking for potential business or development partners. Invention of the internet has made work easy because ministry officials can make deals over internet enabled calls. In addition, today one is able to make video calls with the aid of various internet applications.

This means that the internet is an essential communication tool that has transformed the whole world in terms of accessibility (Aspray, 2008). Development in the internet is continuously advancing as several mobile gadgets have been developed to enable more people to access internet. This ranges from the use of laptops which are portable computers to hand devices such as mobile phones.

Several events led to the advancement of the internet in the world today. All these events revolve around the fact that everyone wanted easy and cheap modes of communication. As the world developed and people started migrating from their homes to other countries and continents in the world, they needed to communicate with people back at home.

Therefore, this led to the advancement in the internet to enable them to communicate effectively with people back at their homes. In addition, the development of the digital world played a crucial role in development and advancement, in internet.

This means that due to the creation of digital images and other effects that could be translated electronically; it was vital to advance internet. This was vital because people required sending and receiving photos and other data through the internet. Many countries in the world came up with strategies of ensuring that computer applications studies are compulsory in their public and private institutions (Hewson, 2002).

The level of computer literacy in the world played a leading role in the advancement of internet as teachers and students wanted to get the information online. In fact, it is easier to get information from internet compared to going through books in the library. This is due to the simple nature of data searching through the search engines in the internet. Internet was advanced to enable professionals to consult on their work from wherever they are in the world without necessarily travelling to hold physical meetings.

Internet has enabled the world to become small in the sense that regardless the distance between people, they can close business transactions effectively. This is because business partners may meet and transact their business in the virtual world through the internet.

For instance, social networks, which are supported by the internet, have created a global scenario where people can mingle and make friends. In fact, strangers are meeting through internet, and if they have common activities they may extend them to their benefits. In addition, people abroad have been able to communicate with their family members and friends without incurring a lot of costs.

Internet has enabled people to shop from anywhere in the world by visiting desired websites. This has happened especially in the motor vehicle business where a consumer accesses motor dealers through the search machines. The customer is able to see various motor vehicles available in the dealers’ yards.

All information regarding vehicles is made available on the internet and upon making the desired choice, negotiations start (Misa, 2011). This maybe in the form of electronic mails, internet enabled phone calls or live chats. When they agree on terms of purchase and shipping the vehicle to customer’s location, payment is done through internet payment systems.

Then the vehicle is shipped to the customer who throughout the process keeps in touch with the dealers through internet. Internet has enhanced learning in universities and other learning institutions by providing easy means of accessing information. In fact, there is a variety of information available in the internet hence allowing students to have access to a lot of knowledge.

Everything that has advantages may be accompanied by several disadvantages. Internet has many advantages, but it also has a dark side of its advancement. There has been cases of internet crimes where people have lost their property and lives to internet friends. This happens where one discloses their information to strangers who purport to be looking for business accomplices (Weber, 2004).

After they get all the necessary information, they get access to bank accounts draining all the money to their accounts. Many people in the world have committed suicide after losing their long saved fortunes to internet conmen. Internet has negatively impacted social lives where young people have been exposed to pornographic materials. These materials have corrupted minds of youths hence causing them to engage in irresponsible sexual behaviors.

As a result, it has led to spread of sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AID among young people. Internet has contributed to increased rate of piracy hence affecting artists (Morozov, 2011). This happens because upon the release of their music and other electronic works of art people send them to the internet making it easy for others to download. This affects their profitability as majority of people who get access to the works of art pay almost nothing.

In addition, people have lost their lives by meeting bandits from the internet. This is where people start up relationships on the internet and upon meeting they may disagree on some things. This might lead to physical confrontation or even to loss of lives in some cases. Therefore, internet users should be careful whenever planning to meet or transact any business with strangers.

Internet has transformed lives of many people in the world today as they can access any information with only a click of a mouse. This means that information sources have been made readily available in the world today. Transacting business with people abroad has become easy with the development of electronic payment systems which are aided by the internet.

People can send pictures and other information through the internet to their loved ones and friends. On the other hand, internet should be used wisely to reduce the rates of social crimes. People have lost their lives and property though internet deals, therefore, caution must be taken to prevent such actions.

Abbate, J. (2000). Inventing the Internet . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Aspray, W. C. (2008). Internet and American Business . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hewson, C. Y. (2002). Internet Research Methods: A Practical Guide for the Social and Behavioral Sciences. London, GBR: SAGE Publicatins Inc. (US).

Misa, T. J. (2011). Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present . London: JHU Press.

Morozov, E. (2011). The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. PublicAffairs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Weber, R. (2004). Computers Then and Now . Michigan: Compass Point Books.

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Published on February 4, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A good introduction paragraph is an essential part of any academic essay . It sets up your argument and tells the reader what to expect.

The main goals of an introduction are to:

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• Present your thesis statement —the central point of your essay.

This introduction example is taken from our interactive essay example on the history of Braille.

The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability. The writing system of raised dots used by visually impaired people was developed by Louis Braille in nineteenth-century France. In a society that did not value disabled people in general, blindness was particularly stigmatized, and lack of access to reading and writing was a significant barrier to social participation. The idea of tactile reading was not entirely new, but existing methods based on sighted systems were difficult to learn and use. As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness. This essay begins by discussing the situation of blind people in nineteenth-century Europe. It then describes the invention of Braille and the gradual process of its acceptance within blind education. Subsequently, it explores the wide-ranging effects of this invention on blind people’s social and cultural lives.

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Table of contents

Step 1: hook your reader, step 2: give background information, step 3: present your thesis statement, step 4: map your essay’s structure, step 5: check and revise, more examples of essay introductions, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about the essay introduction.

Your first sentence sets the tone for the whole essay, so spend some time on writing an effective hook.

Avoid long, dense sentences—start with something clear, concise and catchy that will spark your reader’s curiosity.

The hook should lead the reader into your essay, giving a sense of the topic you’re writing about and why it’s interesting. Avoid overly broad claims or plain statements of fact.

Examples: Writing a good hook

Take a look at these examples of weak hooks and learn how to improve them.

• Braille was an extremely important invention.
• The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability.

The first sentence is a dry fact; the second sentence is more interesting, making a bold claim about exactly  why the topic is important.

• The internet is defined as “a global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities.”
• The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education.

Avoid using a dictionary definition as your hook, especially if it’s an obvious term that everyone knows. The improved example here is still broad, but it gives us a much clearer sense of what the essay will be about.

• Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein is a famous book from the nineteenth century.
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement.

Instead of just stating a fact that the reader already knows, the improved hook here tells us about the mainstream interpretation of the book, implying that this essay will offer a different interpretation.

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Next, give your reader the context they need to understand your topic and argument. Depending on the subject of your essay, this might include:

• Historical, geographical, or social context
• An outline of the debate you’re addressing
• A summary of relevant theories or research about the topic
• Definitions of key terms

The information here should be broad but clearly focused and relevant to your argument. Don’t give too much detail—you can mention points that you will return to later, but save your evidence and interpretation for the main body of the essay.

How much space you need for background depends on your topic and the scope of your essay. In our Braille example, we take a few sentences to introduce the topic and sketch the social context that the essay will address:

Now it’s time to narrow your focus and show exactly what you want to say about the topic. This is your thesis statement —a sentence or two that sums up your overall argument.

This is the most important part of your introduction. A  good thesis isn’t just a statement of fact, but a claim that requires evidence and explanation.

The goal is to clearly convey your own position in a debate or your central point about a topic.

Particularly in longer essays, it’s helpful to end the introduction by signposting what will be covered in each part. Keep it concise and give your reader a clear sense of the direction your argument will take.

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As you research and write, your argument might change focus or direction as you learn more.

For this reason, it’s often a good idea to wait until later in the writing process before you write the introduction paragraph—it can even be the very last thing you write.

When you’ve finished writing the essay body and conclusion , you should return to the introduction and check that it matches the content of the essay.

It’s especially important to make sure your thesis statement accurately represents what you do in the essay. If your argument has gone in a different direction than planned, tweak your thesis statement to match what you actually say.

To polish your writing, you can use something like a paraphrasing tool .

You can use the checklist below to make sure your introduction does everything it’s supposed to.

Checklist: Essay introduction

My first sentence is engaging and relevant.

I have introduced the topic with necessary background information.

I have defined any important terms.

My thesis statement clearly presents my main point or argument.

Everything in the introduction is relevant to the main body of the essay.

You have a strong introduction - now make sure the rest of your essay is just as good.

• Argumentative
• Literary analysis

This introduction to an argumentative essay sets up the debate about the internet and education, and then clearly states the position the essay will argue for.

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts is on the rise, and its role in learning is hotly debated. For many teachers who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its critical benefits for students and educators—as a uniquely comprehensive and accessible information source; a means of exposure to and engagement with different perspectives; and a highly flexible learning environment.

This introduction to a short expository essay leads into the topic (the invention of the printing press) and states the main point the essay will explain (the effect of this invention on European society).

In many ways, the invention of the printing press marked the end of the Middle Ages. The medieval period in Europe is often remembered as a time of intellectual and political stagnation. Prior to the Renaissance, the average person had very limited access to books and was unlikely to be literate. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century allowed for much less restricted circulation of information in Europe, paving the way for the Reformation.

This introduction to a literary analysis essay , about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , starts by describing a simplistic popular view of the story, and then states how the author will give a more complex analysis of the text’s literary devices.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale. Arguably the first science fiction novel, its plot can be read as a warning about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, and in popular culture representations of the character as a “mad scientist”, Victor Frankenstein represents the callous, arrogant ambition of modern science. However, far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to gradually transform our impression of Frankenstein, portraying him in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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Your essay introduction should include three main things, in this order:

• An opening hook to catch the reader’s attention.
• Relevant background information that the reader needs to know.
• A thesis statement that presents your main point or argument.

The length of each part depends on the length and complexity of your essay .

The “hook” is the first sentence of your essay introduction . It should lead the reader into your essay, giving a sense of why it’s interesting.

To write a good hook, avoid overly broad statements or long, dense sentences. Try to start with something clear, concise and catchy that will spark your reader’s curiosity.

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

• It gives your writing direction and focus.
• It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.

The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.

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The internet and the pandemic, 90% of americans say the internet has been essential or important to them, many made video calls and 40% used technology in new ways. but while tech was a lifeline for some, others faced struggles.

Pew Research Center has a long history of studying technology adoption trends and the impact of digital technology on society. This report focuses on American adults’ experiences with and attitudes about their internet and technology use during the COVID-19 outbreak. For this analysis, we surveyed 4,623 U.S. adults from April 12-18, 2021. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the  ATP’s methodology .

Chapter 1 of this report includes responses to an open-ended question and the overall report includes a number of quotations to help illustrate themes and add nuance to the survey findings. Quotations may have been lightly edited for grammar, spelling and clarity. The first three themes mentioned in each open-ended response, according to a researcher-developed codebook, were coded into categories for analysis. 

Here are the questions used for this report , along with responses, and its methodology .

The  coronavirus  has transformed many aspects of Americans’ lives. It  shut down  schools, businesses and workplaces and forced millions to  stay at home  for extended lengths of time. Public health authorities recommended  limits on social contact  to try to contain the spread of the virus, and these profoundly altered the way many worked, learned, connected with loved ones, carried out basic daily tasks, celebrated and mourned. For some, technology played a role in this transformation.  

Results from a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted April 12-18, 2021, reveal the extent to which people’s use of the internet has changed, their views about how helpful technology has been for them and the struggles some have faced. 

The vast majority of adults (90%) say the internet has been at least important to them personally during the pandemic, the survey finds. The share who say it has been  essential  – 58% – is up slightly from 53% in April 2020. There have also been upticks in the shares who say the internet has been essential in the past year among those with a bachelor’s degree or more formal education, adults under 30, and those 65 and older. 

A large majority of Americans (81%) also say they talked with others via video calls at some point since the pandemic’s onset. And for 40% of Americans, digital tools have taken on new relevance: They report they used technology or the internet in ways that were new or different to them. Some also sought upgrades to their service as the pandemic unfolded: 29% of broadband users did something to improve the speed, reliability or quality of their high-speed internet connection at home since the beginning of the outbreak.

Still, tech use has not been an unmitigated boon for everyone. “ Zoom fatigue ” was widely speculated to be a problem in the pandemic, and some Americans report related experiences in the new survey: 40% of those who have ever talked with others via video calls since the beginning of the pandemic say they have felt worn out or fatigued often or sometimes by the time they spend on them. Moreover,  changes in screen time  occurred for  Americans generally  and for  parents of young children . The survey finds that a third of all adults say they tried to cut back on time spent on their smartphone or the internet at some point during the pandemic. In addition, 72% of parents of children in grades K-12 say their kids are spending more time on screens compared with before the outbreak. 1

For many, digital interactions could only do so much as a stand-in for in-person communication. About two-thirds of Americans (68%) say the interactions they would have had in person, but instead had online or over the phone, have generally been useful – but not a replacement for in-person contact. Another 15% say these tools haven’t been of much use in their interactions. Still, 17% report that these digital interactions have been just as good as in-person contact.

Some types of technology have been more helpful than others for Americans. For example, 44% say text messages or group messaging apps have helped them a lot to stay connected with family and friends, 38% say the same about voice calls and 30% say this about video calls. Smaller shares say social media sites (20%) and email (19%) have helped them in this way.

The survey offers a snapshot of Americans’ lives just over one year into the pandemic as they reflected back on what had happened. It is important to note the findings were gathered in April 2021, just before  all U.S. adults became eligible for coronavirus vaccine s. At the time, some states were  beginning to loosen restrictions  on businesses and social encounters. This survey also was fielded before the delta variant  became prominent  in the United States,  raising concerns  about new and  evolving variants . 

Here are some of the key takeaways from the survey.

Americans’ tech experiences in the pandemic are linked to digital divides, tech readiness 

Some Americans’ experiences with technology haven’t been smooth or easy during the pandemic. The digital divides related to  internet use  and  affordability  were highlighted by the pandemic and also emerged in new ways as life moved online.

Beyond that, affordability  remained a persistent concern  for a portion of digital tech users as the pandemic continued – about a quarter of home broadband users (26%) and smartphone owners (24%) said in the April 2021 survey that they worried a lot or some about paying their internet and cellphone bills over the next few months. 

From parents of children facing the “ homework gap ” to Americans struggling to  afford home internet , those with lower incomes have been particularly likely to struggle. At the same time, some of those with higher incomes have been affected as well.

Affordability and connection problems have hit broadband users with lower incomes especially hard. Nearly half of broadband users with lower incomes, and about a quarter of those with midrange incomes, say that as of April they were at least somewhat worried about paying their internet bill over the next few months. 3 And home broadband users with lower incomes are roughly 20 points more likely to say they often or sometimes experience problems with their connection than those with relatively high incomes. Still, 55% of those with lower incomes say the internet has been essential to them personally in the pandemic.

At the same time, Americans’ levels of formal education are associated with their experiences turning to tech during the pandemic. 

Those with a bachelor’s or advanced degree are about twice as likely as those with a high school diploma or less formal education to have used tech in new or different ways during the pandemic. There is also roughly a 20 percentage point gap between these two groups in the shares who have made video calls about once a day or more often and who say these calls have helped at least a little to stay connected with family and friends. And 71% of those with a bachelor’s degree or more education say the internet has been essential, compared with 45% of those with a high school diploma or less.

More broadly, not all Americans believe they have key tech skills. In this survey, about a quarter of adults (26%) say they usually need someone else’s help to set up or show them how to use a new computer, smartphone or other electronic device. And one-in-ten report they have little to no confidence in their ability to use these types of devices to do the things they need to do online. This report refers to those who say they experience either or both of these issues as having “lower tech readiness.” Some 30% of adults fall in this category. (A full description of how this group was identified can be found in  Chapter 3. )

These struggles are particularly acute for older adults, some of whom have had to  learn new tech skills  over the course of the pandemic. Roughly two-thirds of adults 75 and older fall into the group having lower tech readiness – that is, they either have little or no confidence in their ability to use their devices, or generally need help setting up and learning how to use new devices. Some 54% of Americans ages 65 to 74 are also in this group. 

Americans with lower tech readiness have had different experiences with technology during the pandemic. While 82% of the Americans with lower tech readiness say the internet has been at least important to them personally during the pandemic, they are less likely than those with higher tech readiness to say the internet has been essential (39% vs. 66%). Some 21% of those with lower tech readiness say digital interactions haven’t been of much use in standing in for in-person contact, compared with 12% of those with higher tech readiness. 

46% of parents with lower incomes whose children faced school closures say their children had at least one problem related to the ‘homework gap’

As school moved online for many families, parents and their children experienced profound changes. Fully 93% of parents with K-12 children at home say these children had some online instruction during the pandemic. Among these parents, 62% report that online learning has gone very or somewhat well, and 70% say it has been very or somewhat easy for them to help their children use technology for online instruction.

Still, 30% of the parents whose children have had online instruction during the pandemic say it has been very or somewhat difficult for them to help their children use technology or the internet for this. 

The survey also shows that children from households with lower incomes who faced school closures in the pandemic have been especially likely to encounter tech-related obstacles in completing their schoolwork – a phenomenon contributing to the “ homework gap .”

Overall, about a third (34%) of all parents whose children’s schools closed at some point say their children have encountered at least one of the tech-related issues we asked about amid COVID-19: having to do schoolwork on a cellphone, being unable to complete schoolwork because of lack of computer access at home, or having to use public Wi-Fi to finish schoolwork because there was no reliable connection at home. 

This share is higher among parents with lower incomes whose children’s schools closed. Nearly half (46%) say their children have faced at least one of these issues. Some with higher incomes were affected as well – about three-in-ten (31%) of these parents with midrange incomes say their children faced one or more of these issues, as do about one-in-five of these parents with higher household incomes.

Prior Center work has documented this “ homework gap ” in other contexts – both  before the coronavirus outbreak  and  near the beginning of the pandemic . In April 2020, for example, parents with lower incomes were particularly likely to think their children would face these struggles amid the outbreak.

Besides issues related to remote schooling, other changes were afoot in families as the pandemic forced many families to shelter in place. For instance, parents’ estimates of their children’s screen time – and family rules around this – changed in some homes. About seven-in-ten parents with children in kindergarten through 12th grade (72%) say their children were spending more time on screens as of the April survey compared with before the outbreak. Some 39% of parents with school-age children say they have become less strict about screen time rules during the outbreak. About one-in-five (18%) say they have become more strict, while 43% have kept screen time rules about the same. 

More adults now favor the idea that schools should provide digital technology to all students during the pandemic than did in April 2020

Americans’ tech struggles related to digital divides gained attention from policymakers and news organizations as the pandemic progressed.

On some policy issues, public attitudes changed over the course of the outbreak – for example, views on what K-12 schools should provide to students shifted. Some 49% now say K-12 schools have a responsibility to provide all students with laptop or tablet computers in order to help them complete their schoolwork during the pandemic, up 12 percentage points from a year ago.

The shares of those who say so have increased for both major political parties over the past year: This view shifted 15 points for Republicans and those who lean toward the GOP, and there was a 9-point increase for Democrats and Democratic leaners.

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say the government has this responsibility, and within the Republican Party, those with lower incomes are more likely to say this than their counterparts earning more money. 

Video calls and conferencing have been part of everyday life

Americans’ own words provide insight into exactly how their lives changed amid COVID-19. When asked to describe the new or different ways they had used technology, some Americans mention video calls and conferencing facilitating a variety of virtual interactions – including attending events like weddings, family holidays and funerals or transforming where and how they worked. 5 From family calls, shopping for groceries and placing takeout orders online to having telehealth visits with medical professionals or participating in online learning activities, some aspects of life have been virtually transformed: 

“I’ve gone from not even knowing remote programs like Zoom even existed, to using them nearly every day.” – Man, 54

“[I’ve been] h andling … deaths of family and friends remotely, attending and sharing classical music concerts and recitals with other professionals, viewing [my] own church services and Bible classes, shopping. … Basically, [the internet has been] a lifeline.”  – Woman, 69

“I … use Zoom for church youth activities. [I] use Zoom for meetings. I order groceries and takeout food online. We arranged for a ‘digital reception’ for my daughter’s wedding as well as live streaming the event.” – Woman, 44

When asked about video calls specifically, half of Americans report they have talked with others in this way at least once a week since the beginning of the outbreak; one-in-five have used these platforms daily. But how often people have experienced this type of digital connectedness varies by age. For example, about a quarter of adults ages 18 to 49 (27%) say they have connected with others on video calls about once a day or more often, compared with 16% of those 50 to 64 and just 7% of those 65 and older. 

Even as video technology became a part of life for users, many  accounts of burnout  surfaced and some speculated that “Zoom fatigue” was setting in as Americans grew weary of this type of screen time. The survey finds that some 40% of those who participated in video calls since the beginning of the pandemic – a third of all Americans – say they feel worn out or fatigued often or sometimes from the time they spend on video calls. About three-quarters of those who have been on these calls several times a day in the pandemic say this.

Fatigue is not limited to frequent users, however: For example, about a third (34%) of those who have made video calls about once a week say they feel worn out at least sometimes.

These are among the main findings from the survey. Other key results include:

Some Americans’ personal lives and social relationships have changed during the pandemic:  Some 36% of Americans say their own personal lives changed in a major way as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. Another 47% say their personal lives changed, but only a little bit.   About half (52%) of those who say major change has occurred in their personal lives due to the pandemic also say they have used tech in new ways, compared with about four-in-ten (38%) of those whose personal lives changed a little bit and roughly one-in-five (19%) of those who say their personal lives stayed about the same.

Even as tech helped some to stay connected, a quarter of Americans say they feel less close to close family members now compared with before the pandemic, and about four-in-ten (38%) say the same about friends they know well. Roughly half (53%) say this about casual acquaintances.

The majority of those who tried to sign up for vaccine appointments in the first part of the year went online to do so:  Despite early problems with  vaccine rollout  and  online registration systems , in the April survey tech problems did  not  appear to be major struggles for most adults who had tried to sign up online for COVID-19 vaccines. The survey explored Americans’ experiences getting these vaccine appointments and reveals that in April 57% of adults had tried to sign themselves up and 25% had tried to sign someone else up. Fully 78% of those who tried to sign themselves up and 87% of those who tried to sign others up were online registrants. 

When it comes to difficulties with the online vaccine signup process, 29% of those who had tried to sign up online – 13% of all Americans – say it was very or somewhat difficult to sign themselves up for vaccines at that time. Among five reasons for this that the survey asked about, the most common  major  reason was lack of available appointments, rather than tech-related problems. Adults 65 and older who tried to sign themselves up for the vaccine online were the most likely age group to experience at least some difficulty when they tried to get a vaccine appointment.

Tech struggles and usefulness alike vary by race and ethnicity.  Americans’ experiences also have varied across racial and ethnic groups. For example, Black Americans are more likely than White or Hispanic adults to meet the criteria for having “lower tech readiness.” 6 Among broadband users, Black and Hispanic adults were also more likely than White adults to be worried about paying their bills for their high-speed internet access at home as of April, though the share of Hispanic Americans who say this declined sharply since April 2020. And a majority of Black and Hispanic broadband users say they at least sometimes have experienced problems with their internet connection. 

Still, Black adults and Hispanic adults are more likely than White adults to say various technologies – text messages, voice calls, video calls, social media sites and email – have helped them a lot to stay connected with family and friends amid the pandemic.

Tech has helped some adults under 30 to connect with friends, but tech fatigue also set in for some.  Only about one-in-five adults ages 18 to 29 say they feel closer to friends they know well compared with before the pandemic. This share is twice as high as that among adults 50 and older. Adults under 30 are also more likely than any other age group to say social media sites have helped a lot in staying connected with family and friends (30% say so), and about four-in-ten of those ages 18 to 29 say this about video calls. 

Screen time affected some negatively, however. About six-in-ten adults under 30 (57%) who have ever made video calls in the pandemic say they at least sometimes feel worn out or fatigued from spending time on video calls, and about half (49%) of young adults say they have tried to cut back on time spent on the internet or their smartphone.

• Throughout this report, “parents” refers to those who said they were the parent or guardian of any children who were enrolled in elementary, middle or high school and who lived in their household at the time of the survey. ↩
• People with a high-speed internet connection at home also are referred to as “home broadband users” or “broadband users” throughout this report. ↩
• Family incomes are based on 2019 earnings and adjusted for differences in purchasing power by geographic region and for household sizes. Middle income is defined here as two-thirds to double the median annual family income for all panelists on the American Trends Panel. Lower income falls below that range; upper income falls above it. ↩
• A separate  Center study  also fielded in April 2021 asked Americans what the government is responsible for on a number of topics, but did not mention the coronavirus outbreak. Some 43% of Americans said in that survey that the federal government has a responsibility to provide high-speed internet for all Americans. This was a significant increase from 2019, the last time the Center had asked that more general question, when 28% said the same. ↩
• Quotations in this report may have been lightly edited for grammar, spelling and clarity. ↩
• There were not enough Asian American respondents in the sample to be broken out into a separate analysis. As always, their responses are incorporated into the general population figures throughout this report. ↩

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Table of contents, 34% of lower-income home broadband users have had trouble paying for their service amid covid-19, experts say the ‘new normal’ in 2025 will be far more tech-driven, presenting more big challenges, what we’ve learned about americans’ views of technology during the time of covid-19, key findings about americans’ views on covid-19 contact tracing, how americans see digital privacy issues amid the covid-19 outbreak, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Essay on Uses of Internet – Advantages and Disadvantages

Essay on uses of Internet – advantages, and disadvantages: – The Internet is one of the best gifts of science. It has made our life and lifestyle much easier than before. Today Team GuideToExam brings to you a number of essays on the internet along with the advantages and disadvantages of the internet.

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Table of Contents

Essay on Internet advantages and disadvantages (50 Words)

The Internet is a modern gift of science to us. In this modern world, we can’t do anything without the use of the internet. We all know the use of the internet in business, online transactions, different official works, etc. Students also use the internet to boost their studies.

But there are both advantages and disadvantages of the internet for students. Some students know how can the internet be used to improve their studies, but due to misuse of the internet some students loss, their valuable time and can’t score well in exams. But we can’t deny the use of the internet in education, business, online transactions, etc.

Essay on Internet advantages and disadvantages (150 Words)         

The Internet is the greatest invention of science. It helps us in getting every piece of information with a click. We can share information, and get connected with people around the world through the use of the internet.

The Internet is a vast storage of information where we can get a bunch of information from different fields. There are both uses and abuses of the internet. The use of the internet in business has developed the business in modern times.

In today’s world, the use of the internet in education can also be seen. Some advanced schools and colleges in our country have introduced the digital class. It has become possible due to the uses of the internet.

Though there are a lot of advantages of the internet, a few disadvantages of the internet can also be seen. Misuse of the internet has always been a headache for national security. We need to know the proper uses of the internet so we can be beneficial from this modern invention of science.

Essay on Internet advantages and disadvantages (200 Words )

In today’s world, we use the internet in every walk of our life. About two decades ago there was a question in most people’s minds ‘how can the internet be used’. But in today’s world, the uses of the internet are very common almost in every field.

Today the use of the internet for students has been very common. Students can get online help from different websites, they can opt for online coaching, online courses, etc. use of the internet can be seen in every sphere of life.

It has connected the whole world. The Internet provides us with various moods of communication like email, social networking sites, web and video calls, etc. on the other hand use of the internet in business has brought a revolutionary change to the market.

The Internet has promoted the online marketing platform in the world. Now a businessman can sell his product online from his home.

Though we can point out many advantages of the internet, there are some abuses of the internet too. The misuse of the internet can be seen among some students. They sometimes stick to social networking sites and waste their valuable time.

As a result of that, they don’t get much time for studies.  They should know the proper uses of the internet and should use it for their benefit.

Essay on Internet advantages and disadvantages (300 Words )

Introduction to internet essay: – The Internet is a modern invention of science that has brought a revolutionary change to our lives. Using the internet, we can access any information from anywhere that has been stored on the web.

In today’s world, we can’t imagine anything without the internet. There are a lot of advantages of the internet, but it is impossible to turn our faces from the disadvantages of the internet.

Uses of the internet: – The internet is used for any purpose. It is used to send emails, online chat, online transactions, share files, access different web pages, etc. On the other hand, in this modern era, a businessman can’t grow his business without the use of the internet in business.

Again the use of the internet in education has completely changed our education system. The use of the internet for students is very necessary as a student can get all his syllabus-oriented information on the web.

Abuses of the internet/ Disadvantages of the internet: – We all know the advantages of the internet. But there are some abuses of the internet too. We can’t deny the fact that the internet has brought a revolutionary change to our lifestyle, but we can’t ignore the disadvantages of the internet.

First of all, a person who spend too much time in from of a computer may fall ill. It may damage his/her eyesight. On the other hand, sometimes the internet can provide us with the wrong information. Because on internet or web anyone can post any information.

So sometimes wrong information can also be posted on the internet. Again hackers may post malicious links and can cause harm to our confidential data. One of the most dangerous disadvantages of the internet in today’s time is fraud business. With the popularity of the internet, we can see rapid growth in the fraud business.

Conclusion to internet essay: – The Internet has made our work easy in every field. With the invention of the internet human civilization has developed a lot. Though there are both advantages and disadvantages of the internet, we can’t deny the fact that the internet has developed us a lot.

Everything depends on its use. We all need to know “how can the internet be used” and should use the internet for our benefit.

Essay on Internet advantages and disadvantages (400 Words )

Introduction to internet essay: – The Internet has completely changed our lifestyle and the style of our work as well. The invention of the internet has saved our time and reduced our effort in almost every work. The Internet can provide any information to us in no time that has been stored in it. So the question is ‘how can the internet be used?’. In order to use the internet, we require a telephone connection, a computer, and a modem.

Uses of the internet: –  The uses of the internet are immense. Internet is used everywhere such as in schools, colleges, banks, shopping malls, railways, airports, etc. Moreover, we use the internet at home for different purposes. We can access different websites, and social networking sites can make online transactions through the internet.

Different files and information can be shared via emails or messengers. The use of the internet in business has made a different platform for both- buyers and sellers. We have lots of advantages of the internet.

Uses of the internet for students: – The use of the internet for students is like a blessing to them. Students can find any needed information on the web to boost up their studies. Now a day the use of the internet in education is very common. The educational institutions provide internet for students at schools so that their knowledge can be improved.

Abuses of the internet or Disadvantages of the internet: – We can’t decline the fact that the uses of the internet have developed human civilization a lot, But we must agree that we have both advantages and disadvantages of the internet. The abuses of the internet or misuse of the internet can ruin a person at any moment.

Generally, abuses of the internet or internet abuse mean the improper use of the internet. These days teenagers are found addicted to the internet as they spend most of their time on the internet playing online games, surfing social networking sites, etc.

As a result, they are lacking behind in their study. On the other hand, lots of people have become victims of cybercrime. Some anti-social groups use the internet to deceive people through cheating funds. Again hackers may easily access our personal information that has been stored in the internet. Misuse of the internet can spoil our life.

Conclusion to internet essay: –  Excess or misuse of everything is bad. The use of the internet has developed us to a great extent. It has made our life simple, easy, and comfortable as well.

Uses of the internet in education have made us wiser than before, use of the internet in business has formed a different and wider market for us. Misuse of the internet can definitely ruin us but if we use the internet for our benefit, it will make our life easier and more simple in the future.

Long Essay on Internet advantages and disadvantages (800 Words)

Introduction to internet essay: – The internet is naturally one of the most exciting and brilliant gifts of science to mankind. The invention of the internet and its uses of the internet have radically changed the ways of our life and living standards as well. In today’s world, most of our routine activities are done through the internet.

How can the internet be used: – Everybody knows the uses of the internet. In order to use the internet, we need a telephone connection, a computer, and a modem. We can also use the internet through mobile via hotspot.

  Uses of the internet: – In this modern era, there is hardly any walk of life that is not affected by the internet. Most shops, offices, factories, and service centers use the internet to make their work easier. It is called ‘the storehouse of information. The whole world has been made a global village with the invention of the internet.

The Internet has reduced the load of work from our offices. A huge amount of data can be stored on the internet. We can get each and every information in a click from our doorstep, can communicate with our near and dear ones at any time from anywhere, can make payments online, can buy and sell products online, etc. All these become possible only because of the internet.

Uses of the internet in Education: – The use of the internet in education has brought a remarkable change to our education system. Now a student can have access to any required information on the web.

Earlier it was very difficult for a student to collect data in order to prepare a project on a specific subject. But now it can be found on the web with a click. Moreover, they can share their ideas with their friends through email or social networking sites.

Use of the internet in business: – The use of the internet in business has upgraded the standard of business. In this century it is really hard to imagine an established business without the use of the internet. Now the internet has become a vital tool for marketing and advertising.

The use of the internet in business can boost the business by promoting or advertising the product. It can reach a more targeted audience/buyer/consumers through online promotion. Thus now the day internet is considered very useful in business.

Use of the internet in communication: – The invention of the internet helps a lot in globalization. The whole world is connected directly or indirectly through the internet. In earlier days’ people had to write letters to communicate with others who were not near to them.

But after the invention of the telephone, people could make calls to each other. But then came the internet as the blessing of science and now people can not only talk to each other on phone, but also they can watch each other live sitting at home.

Through social networking sites, we can get in touch with our friends, we can share information, and documents via emails, etc.

Abuses of internet / Disadvantages of the internet: – Does the internet have any disadvantages? YES, there a few disadvantages to the internet. It is very hard to believe that there are a few abuses of internet too. We know that excess of everything is bad. Excess use of the internet can also be harmful to our health.

On the other hand, internet can distract us at our work. Teenagers are seen as addicted to the internet. They spend hour after hour in front of the mobile or computer and waste their valuable time.

The Internet is a source of vast information, simultaneously it offers numerous sources of entertainment too. The major disadvantage of the internet is that sometimes it provides illegal sources of entertainment like pornography, private videos, etc.

People who fall prey to it may get addicted and thus may get distracted from their work. We can get benefited if we can skip the abuses of internet and use it to enhance our knowledge.

Misuse of internet: – There are numerous uses of the internet. But as we discussed earlier there are disadvantages to the internet too. Misuse of the internet may cause serious harm to mankind. One of the main misuses of the internet is Cyberbullying. A fake profile can be made on social networking sites to threaten people.

Anti-social groups or terrorist may use internet to spread anti-social activities. On the other hand, lots of black hate activities take place on the internet. After the invention of internet our personal and official data are accessible in the internet.

Though they are kept protected, the misuse of internet always causes a threat to that confidential information. Hackers may hack those data any may threat to reveal that information in public. Again with the popularity of social networking sites, a new trend of spreading rumors in public is seen these days.

Conclusion to internet essay: – Different people have different opinions on the internet. But we can’t ignore the benefits of internet. It has completely changed our lives and lifestyle as well. Though there are a few disadvantages of the internet too, we need to skip those internet abuses and try to use it for the development of mankind.

Essay on My Mother

Long Essay on Internet advantages and disadvantages (650 Words)

Introduction to internet essay: – internet is one of the modern wonders of science that connects crores of computers across the world. After the invention of the internet, it has become very easy to do our day-to-day activities which took too much time before. With the use of internet, a lots of work can be done in a minute or two.

How can the internet be used: – In today’s world it is not necessary to teach anyone “how can the internet be used?”. Everybody knows how to use internet. Earlier we need a telephone connection, a modem and a computer to use the internet.

Now modern technology has provided us lots of other methods to use the internet. Now we can use the internet through mobile or other modern routers.

Uses of internet: – In this modern era, the internet is used in every walk of life. In the world of communication, internet plays a vital role. With the invention of the internet, communication has become very easy and simple. In earlier days’ letters were the most depended mode of communication.

But it was very time taking. A piece of urgent information can’t be shared through letters. But now we can share information via emails, SMS, or social networking sites within a minute. 

Simultaneously the uses of the internet have reduced the use of paper and paperwork to a great extent. Now information or important documents can be kept on the web or through emails rather than keeping it in the paper. Internet is the storehouse of vast knowledge. We can get any information within a minute on the web.

We can make online transactions, take online courses, book our train-bus-air tickets online, watch videos, share thoughts, ideas using internet.  (But there are both uses and abuses of internet. We will discuss the abuses of the internet or internet abuse separately).

Uses of internet for students: – There are various internet for students. A student can do research online degrees, get involved in part-time jobs, and appear in the mock test using internet. Students need to know the proper uses of internet to get benefited from it.

In the web, students can find various applications and tools that can enhance their studies. In this developing world, educational institutions are seen spending a huge amount of money to set up internet facilities for students at their institutions as they are aware of the various uses of the internet for students.

Use of internet in business: – The uses of internet in business has strengthened the business opportunity and business standard as well. The internet can maximize the profit in business. There are many advantages of using internet in business.

The use of internet for business purpose can create a platform for business. Now a day’s internet is the most powerful tool for advertising and marketing as well. Online advertising is proved to be the best publicity in this century. It can reach more targeted audience rather than manual publicity.

On the other hand, with the use of the internet business meetings can be organized through video conferencing. Again there are lots of tools and software available for accounting and bookkeeping in business. The Internet has introduced a new method of payment i.e. online payment. Now a businessman can sell his product online and can reach a wider market than before.

Abuses of internet / Disadvantages of the internet: – The improper use of internet is known as abuses of the internet. The first and foremost abuses of internet are the excessive use of social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc.

The social media is to communicate with our near and dear ones. But some people especially some students spend too much time on those social networking sites and waste their valuable time. Again internet has promoted some cheat funds that have ruined many people.

Conclusion to internet essay: – The Internet has developed mankind to a great extent. We need to use internet for the wellness of mankind.

Essay on uses and abuses of internet (950 Words)

Uses of internet.

The Internet is nowadays a kind of compulsory thing in our daily lives. Uses of the Internet in our daily life have become obligatory. We spend lots of time on the Internet to get an answer to every question which strikes our minds.

We can even fulfill our desire to learn more with the help of the internet. The optimistic use of the Internet makes our lives straightforward and plain. As every single thing on this earth has both its positive and negative sides, the Internet has also got its negative and positive sides.

It is up to us to utilize our time on the internet in a productive manner. While there are various uses of the Internet but you can use the internet for getting an online education. You can use the Internet to promote your business online.

The uses of the internet in education

Nowadays with the help of the internet, we can do online courses and improve our writing. We also get the answer of every answer to every question on the internet is it a question of English or of algebra.

If we want to become flourishing in our career or business the Internet is a miraculous tool, but only the positive and productive use of the Internet will assist us to do so. Students these days are using the Internet to gain knowledge of fresh skills and even to acquire degrees in professional online courses.

Likewise, educators use the Internet for teaching and sharing their knowledge and experience throughout the world with the help of the internet. The internet has changed the lives of students massively.

Students nowadays are starting to use the Internet so that they can learn more and pass the competitive exams or entrance exams. That’s why more than half of the students are coupled with the internet.

Abuses of internet

Cybercrime (use of computers in unlawful doings.): Offenses those are committed against individuals or groups with a criminal purpose to deliberately harm the status/name of the victim or cause physical or mental damage, or loss, to the victim using modern networks such as the Internet.

Cyberbullying: Cyberbullying is a form of bullying or harassment using electronic devices or simply using the internet. Cyberbullying is also known as online bullying. Cyberbullying is when someone bullies or hassles others on social media sites.

Damaging bullying behavior can include posting rumors, threats, and a victim’s personal information on the internet.

Electronic spam: This refers to sending the unwanted advertisement.

Advantages of internet

Internet helps us to boost the speed of our daily tasks. The Internet is used for research and development. The quality of research is developed by Internet tools only. Again the Use of the Internet provides us speedy and free-of-charge communication.

The best thing is that Communication on the Internet is free and fast. We all are linked with each other on social media sites. Social media is common for both personal and professional purposes.

Uses of the internet in money management       

We can use the internet in money management also. The use of the Internet is not limited to only earning money; it can also be used to manage money. Nowadays we can see thousands of apps, websites, etc. that help us in handling daily management, budget planning, transactions, transfers, etc. and this trend is rising gradually.

The use of Internet banking and mobile banking is also rising. All the banks are really functioning tough to provide Internet banking and mobile apps to empower people to utilize the power of the Internet and the latest money management tools. This is helping the common people a lot.

Uses of the internet in business

People also use the internet to promote their business. They sell their products by using various e-commerce solutions on the internet. E-commerce is booming on the internet and we can see new services and creative businesses starting up every single day, which in turn is creating jobs and thereby reducing unemployment. This is helping numerous people to earn money.

Uses of the internet for shopping in our daily life.

Shopping has become a stress-free task now and almost everybody can order products online there’ll be no one to say anything if you see numerous of products still find nothing to be nice to you or simply if you don’t buy anything.

The competitions in online shopping business are obvious. Shopping sites are more interesting because of the huge discounts different companies are offering to the customers also they offer real choice to the customers. The best part is people get attracted to those things more easily.

The customers can pay cash for the product after the delivery also and also can return the product if they don’t like the same. There are numerous online shops where we can buy the things we need in a very cheap rate in comparison to the local shops.

Conclusion to internet essay: –  Internet has completely changed our lifestyle. It has made our works much easier than before. Internet has brought a remarkable change in the world of communication.

Final Words

So we have come to the concluding part of internet essay or essay on internet. In conclusion, we can say that internet and the uses of internet is a very vast topic to discuss. We have tried to cover as much as we can in our essay on internet.

We have also tried to discuss thoroughly on the different related topic such as uses of the internet for students along with advantages and disadvantages of the internet for students and uses of the internet in education.

Abuses of internet, misuse of internet, use of internet in business etc. These essays on internet are composed in such a way that you can also prepare an article on the internet or a speech on the internet and its uses and abuses. Hope these essays helped you.

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Internet Using as the Source of Information, Essay Example

Pages: 3

Words: 886

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Introduction

In this mankind history, the use of internet is one of the greatest development in the communication industry. Internet has enormous potential by using as the source of information and also has a lot to recommend in terms of providing services. Using internet has many modern functions but there are also bad effects and risks when using it. As with this invention, the internet has its own disadvantages. The internet can not only be seen as one of the finest research tools but it is also danger as it has to be used  very carefully.

In this essay we will be discussing the advantages and drawbacks of using internet as the source of information. In the starting point we will indicate some advantages. After that we will discuss some of the disadvantages of using internet as source of information.

Benefits of Internet using as the source of information

There is no question about that internet has made the world and its miscellaneous wonders just a click away. One has to hardly step outside to get what he needs anymore. In the past 10 years, the use of internet has made tremendous enhancements with the technology advancements.  The internet is faster and provides more information than other resources of information. Users can easily retrieve the desired answers by typing anything in the search engines. These search engines are powerful enough to find out the billions sources of data just based on single small word or a sentence which is useful for research. Sitting in the library, turning the pages as to find one authentic source, these days are gone now. For students internet as an opportunity of finding the spectacular wealth of information which strengthen their learning.

Use of internet allows researchers in preparing the projects and do professionally work conveniently. It has made collaborative work  easier not just in terms of cost but it is also nearly immediate sharing of knowledge, ideas and skills. No matter what question or research you have on any topic or subject, surely there is a particular site which will help the users in searching as there is a wide amount of data available in the world of internet especially if the facility of advanced search is used. Internet can be the excellent step for students, researchers, office workers, teachers if used wisely as it plays an essential role in terms of education.

The students who are using internet in the universities can search the e-library they can take the lectures from there which were taught in the class. Apart from that, the information on the internet is more vivid than books. In internet there are audio, video, image materials for users which is more easy to understand the concept of learning. One of the advantage is that user can sit in the comfort of home and can research twenty four seven for them who exactly know how to do searching with the time consumption.

Drawbacks of Internet using as the source of information

With this unpredictable growing of the internet in public, the internet is not secure and it also creates the theft of information which is one of the danger act. Researchers or uses personal information is at risk which is being processed by the rogue persons.

One more and very big disadvantage of using internet is that the people are forgetting the use of books and the library. There was a time that people used to spend lot of time in reading books of their interest or field from various authors which increases their knowledge and the use of mind in analytical way of thinking. Today due to the use of internet everything is available online with a one search tab. It is easy comfort in today’s world to sit at home and have your researches and assignment through internet without gaining the knowledge which actually is the purpose of the work. The information and the material on the internet is not even evaluated that it’s been from the correct source or the fake one. Anyone from any part of the country can publish anything on the internet and there is no check on the quality control of the data and it is very difficult to find the genuine source of the information. The use of internet had increased the communication among the people. The conversation is the thing which is more likely to be expressed through spoken language. Due to the use of internet a communication barrier has been arrived due to less personal interaction which results a big loss of the social skills.

If we conclude,  Internet is somehow behaving like a drug nowadays. people around the world are getting addicted of it. There are many advantages also along with the disadvantages . It became the part of our daily routine life. Nobody knows when to stop using internet. This change in the behavior of the people is a kind of illness nowadays. Overuse of internet is leading people to live into a limited cave and thinking and they are getting far away from the modern and real life. But it also is taking us in the use of technology simultaneously. It increased the network of communication, the relations, the world wide information etc. It is very important to understand and use the right direction of the internet which is very helpful in everyone’s life.

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Published by the Berggruen Institute

• Technology & the Human
• Future of Capitalism
• Philosophy & Culture
• Geopolitics & Deglobalization
• Future of Democracy
• Digital Society

We Need To Rewild The Internet 

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

Maria Farrell is a writer and keynote speaker on technology and the future. She has worked on technology policy at the International Chamber of Commerce, ICANN and The World Bank.

Robin Berjon is an expert in digital governance and has contributed to numerous web standards, including the Global Privacy Control (GPC). He works on novel web protocols such as IPFS and sits on the W3C’s Board of Directors and the ICO’s Technology Advisory Panel.

“The word for world is forest” — Ursula K. Le Guin

In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.

So-called “scientific forestry” was that century’s growth hacking. It made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. They were replaced with lower-skilled laborers following basic algorithmic instructions to keep the monocrop tidy, the understory bare.

Information and decision-making power now flowed straight to the top. Decades later when the first crop was felled, vast fortunes were made, tree by standardized tree. The clear-felled forests were replanted, ready to extend the boom. Readers of the American political anthropologist of anarchy and order, James C. Scott, know what happened next.

It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben , or “forest death,” was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered.

The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word . They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.

They’ve concentrated into a series of near-planetary duopolies: For example, as of April 2024, Google and Apple’s internet browsers have captured almost 85% of the world market share, Microsoft and Apple’s two desktop operating systems over 80% . Google runs 84% of global search and Microsoft 3%. Slightly more than half of all phones come from Apple and Samsung, while over 99% of mobile operating systems run on Google or Apple software. Two cloud computing providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure make up over 50% of the global market. Apple and Google’s email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests.

Two kinds of everything may be enough to fill a fictional ark and repopulate a ruined world, but can’t run an open, global “network of networks” where everyone has the same chance to innovate and compete. No wonder internet engineer Leslie Daigle termed the concentration and consolidation of the internet’s technical architecture “‘climate change’ of the Internet ecosystem.”

Walled Gardens Have Deep Roots

The internet made the tech giants possible. Their services have scaled globally, via its open, interoperable core. But for the past decade, they’ve also worked to enclose the varied, competing and often open-source or collectively provided services the internet is built on into their proprietary domains. Although this improves their operational efficiency it also ensures the flourishing conditions of their own emergence aren’t repeated by potential competitors. For tech giants, the long period of open internet evolution is over. Their internet is not an ecosystem. It’s a zoo.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are consolidating their control deep into the underlying infrastructure through acquisitions, vertical integration, building proprietary networks, creating chokepoints and concentrating functions from different technical layers into a single silo of top-down control. They can afford to, using the vast wealth reaped in their one-off harvest of collective, global wealth.

Taken together, the enclosure of infrastructure and imposition of technology monoculture forecloses our futures. Internet people like to talk about “the stack,” or the layered architecture of protocols, software and hardware, operated by different service providers that collectively delivers the daily miracle of connection. It’s a complicated, dynamic system with a basic value baked into the core design; key functions are kept separate to ensure resilience, generality and create room for innovation.

Initially funded by the U.S. military and designed by academic researchers to function in wartime, the internet evolved to work anywhere, in any condition, operated by anyone who wanted to connect. But what was a dynamic, ever-evolving game of Tetris with distinct “ players” and “layers ” is today hardening into a continent-spanning system of compacted tectonic plates. Infrastructure is not just what we see on the surface; it’s the forces below, that make mountains and power tsunamis. Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using the roads and living in many towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago. 

In 2019, some internet engineers in the global standards-setting body, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), raised the alarm. Daigle, a respected engineer who had previously chaired its oversight committee and internet architecture board, wrote in a policy brief that consolidation meant network structures were ossifying throughout the stack, making incumbents harder to dislodge and violating a core principle of the internet: that it does not create “permanent favorites.” Consolidation doesn’t just squeeze out competition. It narrows the kinds of relationships possible between operators of different services.

As Daigle put it: “The more proprietary solutions are built and deployed instead of collaborative open standards-based ones, the less the internet survives as a platform for future innovation.” Consolidation kills collaboration between service providers through the stack by rearranging an array of different relationships — competitive, collaborative — into a single predatory one. 

Since then, standards development organizations (SDOs) started several initiatives to name and tackle infrastructure consolidation, but these floundered. Bogged down in technical minutiae, unable to separate themselves from their employers’ interests and deeply held professional values of simplification and control , most internet engineers simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees. 

Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “ hyperobject ,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope? 

Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists know something just as important, too; how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it. 

What Is Rewilding?

Rewilding “aims to restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces,” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. More ambitious and risk-tolerant than traditional conservation, it targets entire ecosystems to make space for complex food webs and the emergence of unexpected interspecies relations. It’s less interested in saving specific endangered species. Individual species are just ecosystem components, and focusing on components loses sight of the whole. Ecosystems flourish through multiple points of contact between their many elements, just like computer networks. And like in computer networks, ecosystem interactions are multifaceted and generative. 

Rewilding has much to offer people who care about the internet. As Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe wrote in their book “Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery,” rewilding pays attention “to the emergent properties of interactions between ‘things’ in ecosystems … a move from linear to systems thinking.”

It’s a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble problems. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [which] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It’s the opposite of command-and-control.

Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one. It answers questions like how do we keep going when the monopolies have more money and power? How do we act collectively when they suborn our community spaces, funding and networks? And how do we communicate to our allies what fixing it will look and feel like?

Rewilding is a positive vision for the networks we want to live inside, and a shared story for how we get there. It grafts a new tree onto technology’s tired old stock. And embodied in rewilding’s ecological tools is the collective wisdom of an entire discipline already tackling humanity’s toughest, systemic problems.

What Ecology Knows

Ecology knows plenty about complex systems that technologists can benefit from learning. First, it knows that shifting baselines are real.

If you were born around the 1970s, you probably remember many more dead insects on the windscreen of your parents’ car than on your own; global land-dwelling insect populations are dropping about 9% a decade. If you’re a geek, you probably programmed your own computer to make basic games. You certainly remember a web with more to read than the same five websites. You may have even written your own blog.

But many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole web ) is normal. As Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are “where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.” Damage is already baked in. It even seems natural.

Ecology knows that shifting baselines dampen collective urgency and deepen generational divides. People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. But it’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet . If the internet for you is the massive sky-scraping silo you happen to live inside and the only thing you can see outside is the single, other massive sky-scraping silo, then how can you imagine anything else?

The answer isn’t to make everyone learn about how the original protocols were designed to separate key functions and the power that goes with them (though that’s certainly good to know ). It’s to change how we feel and react to living inside a complex system that needs our care. Tech toxicity stems from there being only one business model for how to internet : concentration, surveillance, control. Further centralizing and managing this broken system will only make it worse. 

Rewilding the internet is not a nostalgia project for middle-aged nerds who miss IRC and Usenet. For many people across the generations today, platforms like Facebook or TikTok are the internet. They’ve long dwelled in walled gardens they think are the world. Concentrated digital power produces the same symptoms that command and control produces in biological ecosystems; acute distress punctuated by sudden collapses once tipping points are reached. Rewilding is a way to collectively see the counterintuitive truth; today’s internet isn’t too wild , even if it feels like that. It’s simply not wild enough.  

It’s important to share that ecological rewilding is a work in progress. What do you rewild to ? Humans have shaped and cultivated landscapes for tens of thousands of years, so what does “wild” even mean? Just as there’s no ecosystem on Earth untouched by human actions, there’s no “true” wildness to return habitats to. And what scale is needed for rewilding to succeed? It’s one thing to reintroduce wolves to the 3,472 square miles of Yellowstone, quite another to cordon off about 20 square miles of a reclaimed polder near Amsterdam. Large and diverse Yellowstone is likely complex enough to adapt to change, but the small Dutch reserve known as Oostvaardersplassen has struggled .

In the 1980s, the Dutch government attempted to regenerate a section of the overgrown Oostvaardersplassen. An independent-minded government ecologist, Frans Vera, said reeds and scrub would dominate unless now-extinct herbivores grazed them. In place of ancient aurochs, the state forest management agency introduced the famously bad-tempered German Heck cattle, and in place of an extinct steppe pony, a Polish semi-feral breed.

Some 30 years on, with no natural predators, and after plans for a wildlife corridor to another reserve came to nothing, there were many more animals than the limited winter vegetation could sustain. People were horrified by starving cows and ponies, and beginning in 2018, government agencies instituted animal welfare checks and culling or removals.

Just turning the clock back was insufficient. The segment of Oostvaardersplassen was too small and too disconnected to be rewilded. Its effectively landlocked status made over-grazing and collapse inevitable, an embarrassing but necessary lesson. Rewilding is a work in progress. It’s not about trying to revert ecosystems to a mythical Eden. Instead, rewilders seek to rebuild resilience by restoring autonomous natural processes and letting them operate at scale to generate complexity. But rewilding, itself a human intervention, can take several turns to get right.  

Whatever we do, the internet isn’t returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or each organization running its own mail server, rather than operating off G-Suite. But shifting baselines mean that everyone using it today needs a shared way to articulate what’s happening, and a collective sense of purpose and possibility.

Some of what we need is already here, especially on the web. Look at the resurgence of RSS feeds, email newsletters and blogs as we discover (yet again) that relying on one app to host global conversations creates a single point of failure and control. New systems are growing, like the Fediverse with its federated islands, or Bluesky with algorithmic choice and composable moderation . 

We don’t know what the future holds. Our job is to keep open as much opportunity as we can, trusting that those who come later will use it. Rewilding gets this. Instead of setting purity tests for which kind of internet is most like the original, we can test changes against the values of the original design.  Do new standards protect the network’s “generality,” i.e. its ability to support multiple uses, or is functionality limited to optimize efficiency for the biggest tech firms? The internet is the technological expression of hard-won human wisdom; general-purpose systems are the most resilient, and it’s risky to concentrate information and control.

Ecologists also know that complexity is not the enemy, it’s the goal. The story of scientific forestry shows the conflict isn’t just between duopoly platforms and everyone else; it’s between a brittle, command-and-control mentality, and the ability to have faith in complex systems that may produce things you didn’t foresee for people you don’t control.

As early as 1985, plant ecologists Steward T.A. Pickett and Peter S. White wrote in “The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics,” that “[an] essential paradox of wilderness conservation is that we seek to preserve what must change.” Some internet engineers know this. David Clark, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who worked on some of the internet’s earliest protocols, wrote an entire book about other network architectures that might have been built, if different values, like security or centralized management, had been prioritized by the internet’s creators.

But our internet took off because it was designed as a general-purpose network, built to connect anyone. Our internet was built to be complex and unbiddable, to do things we cannot yet imagine. When we interviewed Clark for rewilding project, he told us that “‘complex’ implies a system in which you have emergent behavior, a system in which you can’t model the outcomes. Your intuitions may be wrong. But a system that’s too simple means lost opportunities.” Or, as Daigle wrote in that 2019 policy brief , “simplicity is not always the best outcome.” Everything worthwhile we collectively make is complex or, honestly, messy. The cracks are where new people and ideas get in.

Internet infrastructure is a degraded ecosystem, but it’s also a built environment, like a city. Its complexity and unpredictability make it generative, worthwhile and deeply human. In 1961, Jane Jacobs, an American-Canadian activist and author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” argued that mixed-use neighborhoods were safer, happier, more prosperous, and more livable than the sterile, highly controlling designs of urban planners like New York’s Robert Moses.

Both Jacobs and the anthropologist Scott showed that top-down planning is often disastrous because instead of setting the stage for generative interactions it tries to control what people will do. Just like the crime-ridden, Corbusier-like towers Moses crammed people into when he demolished mixed-use neighborhoods and built highways through them, today’s top-down, concentrated internet is, for many, an unpleasant and harmful place. Its owners are hard to remove, and their interests do not align with ours.

As Jacobs wrote: “As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge.” As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day. 

In an ecosystem, everything is infrastructure for everything else. Ecosystems endure because species serve as checks and balances on each other. They have different modes of interaction, not just extraction, but mutualism, commensalism, competition and predation. In flourishing ecosystems, predators are subject to limits . They’re just one part of a complex web that passes calories around, not a one-way ticket to the end of evolution. 

Ecologists know that diversity is resilience .

On July 18, 2001, 11 carriages of a 60-car freight train derailed in the Howard Street Tunnel under Mid-Town Belvedere, a neighborhood just north of downtown Baltimore. Within minutes one carriage containing a highly flammable chemical was punctured. The escaping chemical ignited and soon adjacent carriages were alight in a fire that took about five days to put out. The disaster multiplied and spread. Thick, brick tunnel walls acted like an oven, and temperatures rose to nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. A more than three-foot-wide water main above the tunnels burst, flooding the tunnel with millions of gallons within hours. It only cooled a little. Three weeks later, an explosion linked to the combustible chemical blew out manhole covers located as far as two miles away. 

WorldCom, then the second largest long-distance phone company in the U.S., had fiber-optic cables in the tunnel carrying high volumes of phone and internet traffic. However, according to  Clark, WorldCom’s resilience planning meant traffic was spread over different fiber networks in anticipation of just this kind of event.

On paper, WorldCom had network redundancy. But almost immediately, U.S. internet traffic slowed , and WorldCom’s East Coast and transatlantic phone lines went down. The region’s narrow physical topography had concentrated all those different fiber networks into a single chokepoint, the Howard Street Tunnel. WorldCom’s resilience was, quite literally, incinerated. It had technological redundancy, but not diversity. Sometimes we don’t notice concentration until it’s too late. Read Noema in print.

Clark tells the story of the Howard Street Tunnel fire to show that bottlenecks aren’t always obvious, especially at the operational level, and huge systems that seem secure due to their size and resources, can unexpectedly crumble. 

In today’s internet, much traffic passes through tech firms’ private networks, for example, Google and Meta’s own undersea cables. Much internet traffic is served from a few dominant content distribution networks, like Cloudflare and Akamai, who run their own networks of proxy servers and data centers. Similarly, that traffic goes through an increasingly small number of domain name system (DNS) resolvers, which work like phone books for the internet, linking website names to their numeric address.

All of this improves network speed and efficiency but creates new and non-obvious bottlenecks like the Howard Street Tunnel. Centralized service providers say they’re better resourced and skilled at attacks and failures, but they are also large, attractive targets for attackers and possible single points of system failure.

On Oct. 21, 2016, dozens of major U.S. websites suddenly stopped working. Domain names belonging to Airbnb, Amazon, PayPal, CNN, The New York Times simply didn’t resolve. All were clients of the commercial DNS service provider, Dyn, which had been hit by a cyberattack. Hackers infected tens of thousands of internet-enabled devices with malicious software, creating a network of hijacked devices, or a botnet, that they used to bombard Dyn with queries until it collapsed. America’s biggest internet brands were brought down, essentially, by a network of baby monitors . Although they all likely had resilience planning and redundancies, they went down because a single chokepoint — in one crucial layer of infrastructure — failed.

Consolidation drives fragility. It imposes narrowness. Arranging deliberately varied networks and services into centralized stovepipes means we repeatedly fail to think of the internet as a complex system. Just like the train crash that caused a chemical leak that resulted in burst water pipes, melted fiber-optic cables and blown up manholes, single points of failure in complex critical systems have wide, unpredictable and devastating effects.

Widespread outages due to centralized chokepoints have become so common that investors even use them to identify opportunities. When a failure by cloud provider Fastly took high-profile websites offline in 2021, its share price surged . Investors were delighted by headlines that informed them of an obscure technical service provider with an apparent lock on an essential service. To investors, this critical infrastructure failure doesn’t look like fragility but like a chance to profit.

The result of infrastructural narrowness is baked-in fragility that we only notice after a breakdown. But monoculture is also highly visible in our search and browser tools. Search, browsing and social media are how we find and share knowledge, and how we communicate. They’re a critical, global epistemic and democratic infrastructure, controlled by just a few U.S. companies. Crashes, fires and floods may simply be entropy in action, but systemically concentrated and risky infrastructures are choices made manifest — and we can make better ones.  

The Look & Feel Of A Rewilded Internet

A rewilded internet will have many more service choices. Some services like search and social media will be broken up, as AT&T eventually was . Instead of tech firms extracting and selling people’s personal data, different payment models will fund the infrastructure we need. Right now, there is little explicit provision for public goods like protocols and browsers, essential to making the internet work. The biggest tech firms subsidize and profoundly influence them.

Part of rewilding means taking what’s been pulled inside the big tech stack out of it, and paying for the true costs of connectivity. Some things like basic connectivity we will continue to pay for directly, and others like browsers we will support indirectly but transparently, as described below. The rewilded internet will have an abundance of ways to connect and relate to each other. There won’t be just one or two numbers to call if leaders of a political coup decide to shut the internet down in the middle of the night, as has happened in places like Egypt and Myanmar . No one entity will permanently be on top. A rewilded internet will be a more interesting, usable, stable and enjoyable place to be.

Through extensive research, Nobel-winning economist Elinor Ostrom found that “when individuals are well informed about the problem they face and about who else is involved, and can build settings where trust and reciprocity can emerge, grow, and be sustained over time, costly and positive actions are frequently taken without waiting for an external authority to impose rules, monitor compliance, and assess penalties.” Ostrom found people spontaneously organizing to manage natural resources — from water company cooperation in California to Maine lobster fishermen monitoring each other and repelling outsiders to prevent over-fishing.

Self-organization also exists as part of a key internet function: traffic coordination. Internet exchange points ( IXPs ) are an example of common-pool resource management, where internet service providers (ISPs) collectively agree to carry each other’s data for low or no cost. Network operators of all kinds — telecoms companies, large tech firms, universities, governments and broadcasters — all need to send large amounts of data through other ISPs’ networks so that it gets to its destination.

If they managed this separately through individual contracts, they’d spend much more time and money. Instead, they often form IXPs, typically as independent, not-for-profit associations. As well as managing traffic, IXPs have, in many — and especially developing — countries, formed the backbone of a flourishing technical community that further drives economic development.

Both between people and on the internet, connections are generative. From technical standards to common-pool resource management and even to more localized broadband networks known as “altnets,” internet rewilding already has a deep toolbox of collective action ready to be deployed.

The Road To Rewilding

The list of infrastructures to be diversified is long; as well as pipes and protocols, there are operating systems, browsers, search engines, DNS, social media, advertising, cloud providers, app stores, AI companies and more. Not only are the technologies involved complex, but they’re also intertwined. But freedoms are additive. Showing what can be done in one area creates opportunities in others. First, let’s start with regulation.

The New Drive For Antitrust & Competition

You don’t always need a big new idea like rewilding to frame and motivate major structural change. Sometimes reviving an old idea will do. President Biden’s 2021 “ Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy” revived the original, pro-worker, trust-busting scope and urgency of the early 20th-century legal activist and Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, along with rules and framings that date back to before the 1930s New Deal.

U.S. antitrust law was created to break the power of oligarchs in oil, steel and railroads who threatened America’s young democracy. It gave workers basic protections and saw equal economic opportunity as essential to freedom. This expansive and interdependent view of competition and antitrust as essential for fairness and democracy was whittled away by Chicago School economists’ policies in the 1970s and Regan-era judges’ court rulings over the decades and sidelined by the narrow economic doctrine that intervention is only permitted when monopoly power causes consumer prices to rise. The intellectual monoculture of the consumer harm threshold has since spread globally.

It’s why governments just stood aside as 21st-century tech firms romped to oligopoly. If a regulator’s sole criterion for action is to make sure consumers don’t pay a penny more, then the free or data-subsidized services of tech platforms don’t even register. (Of course, consumers pay in other ways, as these tech giants exploit their personal information for profit.) This laissez-faire approach allowed the biggest firms to choke off competition by acquiring their competitors and vertically integrating service providers, creating the problems we have today. 

Regulators and enforcers in Washington and Brussels now say they have learned that lesson and won’t allow AI dominance to happen as internet concentration did. Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and U.S. Department of Justice antitrust enforcer , Jonathan Kanter, are identifying chokepoints in the AI “ stack ” — concentration in control of processing chips, datasets, computing capacity, algorithm innovation, distribution platforms and user interfaces — and analyzing each potential bottleneck to see if it affects systemic competition. This is potentially good news for people who want to prevent the current dominance of tech giants being grandfathered into our AI future. 

In his 2021 signing of the executive order on competition, President Biden said , “capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation.” Biden’s enforcers are changing the kinds of cases they take up and widening the applicable legal theories on harm that they bring to judges. Instead of the traditionally narrow focus on consumer prices, today’s cases argue that the economic harms perpetrated by dominant firms include those suffered by their workers, small companies and the market as a whole.

Khan and Kanter have jettisoned narrow and abstruse models of market behavior for real-world experiences of healthcare workers, farmers, writers. They get that shutting off economic opportunity fuels far-right extremism. They’ve made antitrust enforcement and competition policy explicitly about coercion versus choice, power versus democracy. Kanter told a recent conference in Brussels that “excessive concentration of power is a threat … it’s not just about prices or output but it’s about freedom, liberty and opportunity.” 

Enforcers in Washington and Brussels are starting to preemptively block tech firms from using dominance in one realm to take over another. After scrutiny by the U.S. FTC and European Commission, Amazon recently abandoned its plan to acquire the home appliance manufacturer, iRobot. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have also moved to stop Apple from using its iPhone platform dominance to squeeze app store competition and dominate future markets through, for example, pushing the usage of CarPlay on automakers and limiting access to its tap-to-pay digital wallet in the financial services sector.

Still, so far, their enforcement actions have focused on the consumer-facing, highly visible parts of the tech giants’ exploitative and proprietary internet. The few, narrow measures of the 2021 executive order that aim to reduce infrastructure-based monopolies, only prevent future abuses like radio spectrum-hogging, not those already locked in . Sure, the best way to deal with monopolies is to stop them from happening in the first place. But unless regulators and enforcers eradicate the existing dominance of these giants now, we’ll be living in today’s infrastructure monopoly for decades, perhaps even a century.

Just imagine applying Khan and Kanter’s chokepoint identification and whole-system harms investigation to the internet’s invisible layers — and doing so today. Just imagine what the future possibilities for internet innovation could be if “capitalism without competition” was rooted out all the way up and down the stack. 

The recent return to more muscular competition enforcement still isn’t radical enough. So far, even activist regulators have shied away from applying the toughest remedies for concentration in long-consolidated markets, such as non-discrimination requirements, functional interoperability and structural separations, i.e. breaking companies up. And talk of declaring the so-called “ natural monopolies ” in search and social media to be public utilities — and forcing them to act as common carriers open to all — is still too extreme for most.

But taken together, these are some of the most powerful tools we have to rewild the internet’s silent and existing vertical integrations; its deliberately moated fiefdoms squatting on bottlenecks of critical national and global infrastructure. Rewilding an already built environment isn’t just sitting back and seeing what tender, living thing can force its way through the concrete. It’s razing to the ground the structures that block out light for everyone not rich enough to live on the top floor.

When the writer and activist Cory Doctorow wrote about how to free ourselves from the clutches of Big Tech, he said that though breaking up big companies will likely take decades, providing strong and mandatory interoperability would open up innovative space and slow the flow of money to the largest firms — money they would otherwise use to deepen their moats.

Doctorow describes “comcom,” or competitive compatibility, as a kind of “guerrilla interoperability, achieved through reverse engineering, bots, scraping and other permissionless tactics.” Before a thicket of invasive laws sprung up to strangle it, comcom was just how people figured out how to fix cars and tractors or re-write software. Comcom drives the try-every-tactic-until-one-works behavior you see in a flourishing ecosystem. 

In an ecosystem, diversity of species is another way of saying “diversity of tactics,” as each successful new tactic creates a new niche to occupy. Whether it’s an octopus camouflaging itself as a sea snake, a cuckoo smuggling her chicks into another bird’s nest, orchids producing flowers that look just like a female bee, or parasites influencing rodent hosts to take life-ending risks, each evolutionary micro-niche is created by a successful tactic. Comcom is simply tactical diversity; it’s how organisms interact in complex, dynamic systems. And humans have demonstrated the epitome of short-term thinking by enabling the oligarchs who are trying to end it.

Efforts are underway. The EU already has several years of experience with interoperability mandates and precious insight into how determined firms work to circumvent such laws. The U.S., however, is still in its early days of ensuring software interoperability, for example, for videoconferencing .”

Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath. 

Much of what we need is already here. Beyond regulators digging deep for courage, vision and bold new litigation strategies, we need vigorous, pro-competitive government policies around procurement, investments and physical infrastructure, that require interoperability at every level and the resources to make it happen. Universities must reject research funding from tech firms because it always comes with conditions, both spoken and unspoken .

Instead, we need more public-funded tech research with publicly released findings aimed at serving the collective good. Such research should investigate power concentration in the internet ecosystem and practical alternatives to it. We need to recognize that much of the internet’s infrastructure is a de facto utility, that any monopolies are critical public resources that we must regain control of.

We must ensure regulatory and financial incentives and support for alternatives including common-pool resource management, community networks, and the myriad other collaborative mechanisms people have always used to provide essential public goods like clean water, roads and defense. 

All this takes money. Governments are starved of tax revenue by the once-in-history windfalls seized by today’s tech giants, so it’s clear where the money is. We need to get it back. We need to stop talking about ethics and hoping the next generation will do a better job and start making demands of power . 

We know all this, but still find it so hard to collectively act. Why? 

Herded into rigid tech plantations rather than functioning, diverse ecosystems, it’s tough to imagine alternatives. Even those who can see clearly may feel helpless and alone. Rewilding unites everything we know we need to do and brings with it a whole new toolbox and vision.

Ecologists face the same systems of exploitation and are organizing urgently, at scale and across domains. They see clearly that the issues aren’t isolated but are instances of the same pathology of command and control, extraction and domination that political anthropologist Scott first noticed in scientific forestry. The solutions are the same in ecology and technology; aggressively use the rule of law to level out unequal capital and power, then rush in to fill the gaps with better ways of doing things.

Keep The Internet, The Internet

Susan Leigh Star, a sociologist and theorist of infrastructure and networks, wrote in her 1999 influential paper, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”:

“Study a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies (as many have), and you miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power. Study an information system and neglect its standards, wires, and settings, and you miss equally essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and change.”

The technical protocols and standards that underlie the internet’s infrastructure are ostensibly developed in open, collaborative SDOs, but are also increasingly under the control of a few companies; so what appear to be “voluntary” standards are often the business choices of the biggest firms.

The dominance of SDOs by big firms also shapes what does not get standardized — for example, search, which is effectively a global monopoly. While efforts to directly address internet consolidation have been raised repeatedly within SDOs, little progress has been made. This is damaging SDOs’ credibility, especially outside the U.S. SDOs must radically change or they will lose their implicit global mandate to steward the future of the internet.

We need internet standards to be global, open and generative. They’re the wire models that give the internet its planetary form, the gossamer-thin but steely-strong threads holding together its interoperability against fragmentation and permanent dominance. We need them to work. As internet engineer Jari Arkko put it in 2020, for the health of the network and all our security, SDOs must “ensure that key aspects of the evolving internet stay open, e.g. through open, standardized interfaces and that open source continues to be an important building block.” If fundamental internet protocols don’t maximize the values of interoperability, generality and openness, then they’re simply not the internet.

Make Laws & Standards Work Together

In 2018, a small group of Californians maneuvered the California Legislature into passing the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Nested in the statute was an unassuming provision, the “right to opt out of sale or sharing” your personal information via a “user-enabled global privacy control” or GPC signal that would create an automated method for doing so. The law didn’t define how GPC might work. As a technical standard was required for browsers, businesses and providers to speak the same language, the signal’s details were delegated to a group of experts.

In July 2021, California’s Attorney General mandated that all businesses use the newly created GPC for California-based consumers visiting their websites. The group of experts is now shepherding the technical specification through global web standards development at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). For California residents, GPC automates the request to “accept” or “reject” sales of your data, such as cookie-based tracking,  on its websites; however, it isn’t yet supported by major default browsers like Chrome and Safari. Broad adoption will take time, but it’s a small step in changing real-world outcomes by driving antimonopoly practices deep into the standards stack — and it’s already being adopted elsewhere.

GPC is not the first legally mandated open standard, but it was deliberately designed from day one to bridge policymaking and standards-setting. The standard provides a mechanism and the law makes it mandatory. It’s a powerful dynamic where all play to their strengths. The idea is gaining ground. A recent United Nations Human Rights Council report recommends that states delegate “regulatory functions to standard-setting organizations.” Our technical standards can be crossbred with institutions to produce protocols for governance that let people shape their online world.

Make Service-Providers — Not Users — Transparent

Today’s internet offers minimal transparency of key internet infrastructure providers. For example, browsers are highly complex pieces of infrastructure that determine how billions of people use the web, yet they are provided for free. That’s because the most commonly used search engines enter into opaque financial deals with browsers, paying them to be set as the default. Since few people change their default search engine, browsers like Safari and Firefox make money by defaulting the search bar to Google, locking in its dominance even as the search engine’s quality of output declines .

This creates a quandary. If antitrust enforcers were to impose competition, browsers would lose their main source of income. Infrastructure requires money, but the planetary nature of the internet challenges our public funding model, leaving the door open to private capture. However, if we see the current opaque system as what it is, a kind of non-state taxation, then we can craft an alternative.

Search engines are a logical place for governments to mandate the collection of a levy that supports browsers and other key internet infrastructure, which could be financed transparently, under open, transnational, multistakeholder oversight.  Imagining new institutional methods to solve old problems at a global scale is one way to rewild the web.

Make Space To Grow

We need to stop thinking of internet infrastructure as too hard to fix. It’s the underlying system we use for nearly everything we do. The former prime minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, and former Canadian deputy foreign minister, Gordon Smith wrote in 2016 that the internet was becoming “the infrastructure of all infrastructure.” It’s how we organize, connect and build knowledge, even — perhaps — planetary intelligence. Right now, it’s concentrated, fragile and utterly toxic. 

Ecologists have re-oriented their field as a “ crisis discipline ,” a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same. Rewilding the internet connects and grows what people are doing across regulation, standards-setting and new ways of organizing and building infrastructure, to tell a shared story of where we want to go. It’s a shared vision with many strategies. The instruments we need to shift away from extractive technological monocultures are at hand or ready to be built. 

Just as a diverse “ pocket forest ” is the surest way to regenerate urban vegetation, a global network with multiple different ways “to internet” is the best insurance policy for future innovation and resilience. We need to rewild the internet for the future, for our freedom to build tools and spaces, and to share knowledge, ideas and stories that haven’t been anticipated by the internet’s current overlords and cannot be contained.

More From Noema Magazine

Watch CBS News

Haven't filed your taxes yet? Here's how to get an extension from the IRS.

By Aimee Picchi

Edited By Anne Marie Lee , Alain Sherter

Updated on: April 15, 2024 / 11:18 AM EDT / CBS News

If you're one of the millions of Americans who have procrastinated filing their taxes ahead of the April 15 deadline, there is a way to get some breathing room: File for an extension. 

The step gives taxpayers until October 15 to file their federal tax returns, and the process is fairly quick — and also free. About 90 million people have filed their 1040s with the IRS as of March 29, the tax agency says . But as it  expects about 128.7 million tax returns this year, that means almost 40 million people have pushed off filing until the last two weeks of the regular tax season.

Almost half of Americans delay working on their taxes, a new survey from tax prep company TaxAct found. Many are stressed by the task, but more than 1 in 4 is worried about owing money to the IRS, the study found.

"Some people don't want to pay the balance due, and say, 'I'll let the government come after me,'" Mark Jaeger, vice president of Tax Operations, at TaxAct, told CBS MoneyWatch. 

But other taxpayers may have had a major life event, like the birth of a child, that prompted them to put off their taxes, he noted. Sometimes an individual's tax forms can be delayed, which then causes the taxpayer to scramble, once the forms arrive, to get their 1040s filed by April 15. 

The good news is that getting an extension "is actually pretty simple," Jaeger said.

What time are taxes due on April 15? 

The regular deadline to file a 2023 tax return with the IRS is 11:59 p.m., in your time zone, on Monday, April 15. 

However, there are some exceptions. For instance, taxpayers in Massachusetts and Maine have until April 17 to file and pay taxes because of the Patriots' Day and Emancipation Day holidays. 

Taxpayers living in some areas affected by extreme weather have  extensions  to file, while individuals and businesses impacted by the Oct. 7  attack on Israel  have also been given more time. Certain active-duty military members and citizens living abroad are also eligible for an extension.

How to request a tax extension

The IRS will give taxpayers an automatic extension if they file  Form 4868 . This one-page document asks for basic information such as your name, address and Social Security number. 

There's another way to request an extension that's even easier, Jaeger said. 

"The simplest way is to go through a do-it-yourself tax software or go to the IRS website and make a payment," he said. "Simply by making a payment, you are filing an extension."

Indeed, the IRS says it automatically counts payments made by the April 15 deadline as an extension, and by taking that step, you won't even need to file a separate Form 4868. 

You can make a payment via the IRS'  Direct Pay , the  Electronic Federal Tax Payment System  or with a  credit or debit card or digital wallet . 

If I get an extension, can I delay paying the IRS? 

Nope. That's because receiving an extension to file isn't an extension to pay what you owe the IRS. 

"Taxpayers who owe should pay their entire obligation, or as much as they can, by the April 15 deadline to avoid penalties and interest," the IRS said on Thursday.

Knowing how much to pay the IRS can be tricky for people who haven't yet filed their taxes, but Jaeger recommends looking at your federal tax payment in the prior year. If you paid, for example, $5,000 in the prior tax year, but have only paid $4,000 in the 2023 tax year, you should send the IRS a payment for the $1,000 difference, he noted.

What is the penalty for failing to pay?

The IRS charges a penalty if you don't pay what you owe the government, the amount if which is based on the percentage of the taxes you didn't pay. 

For instance, if you file an extension and owe the IRS but don't pay by April 15, you'll face the penalty. The IRS charges 0.5% of the unpaid taxes for each month, with a cap of 25% of the unpaid taxes. 

What is the fine for failing to file?

The IRS also levies a fine if you don't file or ask for an extension by April 15.

The failure-to-file penalty is 5% of unpaid taxes for each month or part of the month that the tax return is late. The fine is capped at 25% of your unpaid taxes. 

People who both neglect to file and fail to pay what they owe won't have to pay both fines, however. The IRS said it reduces the failure-to-file penalty by the amount of the failure-to-pay penalty for that month, so that the taxpayer will face a combined total penalty of 5% for each month their return is late. 

What if I can't pay what I owe the IRS?

The IRS will set up a payment plan with taxpayers who can't afford to pay the full amount they owe the tax agency. 

Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.

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How I Use the Internet, According to Nineties Action Movies

By James Folta

I’m sound asleep, when suddenly my computer monitor flashes and wakes me up. An illustration of a large envelope fills the screen—I’ve received a new e-mail, my first in weeks.

I click on the middle of the envelope and a note opens in size thirty-six font. It’s a top-secret assignment for me, a renegade ex-C.I.A. agent who can kick higher than anyone else in the agency.

“Looks like this old dog is heading back to the pound,” I growl, and close the e-mail by turning off my entire computer.

I pull up a digitized photo on the screen. Leaning in, I drag a bright-green box around a detail in the image, type rapidly for a full fifteen seconds, and then softly say, “Enhance.”

The screen zooms, pixelates, and then smooths. I click, type, and say “enhance” four more times, moving deeper and deeper into the background of the photo. The section of the image that had previously shown only a blurry gray wall now reveals a face in shockingly high resolution.

“I’ve hacked your face, you bastard,” I whisper. I click once and the image prints out on glossy photo paper.

I take a deep breath and put on a state-of-the-art helmet with wires coming out of it, and then two state-of-the-art gloves with wires coming out of them. After a faint whoosh, I see my body projected into a pixelated online warehouse filled with bright-green wireframe filing cabinets. In the distance a large sign reads “ SECRET PLANS .”

But I’m too late—an ex-K.G.B. agent who is still fighting the Cold War was hiding behind the cabinets. He punches me in the jaw and laughs, digitally. The wireframe hallways shake with green static and I jolt back into reality. My nose is bleeding and my net-gloves are steaming.

Looks like Ivan wins this round. . . .

My extremely attractive hacking crew is famished, so I type “PIZZA.” A window pops up advertising Vinny’s Pizza Palace, and, despite being run by a man in his late seventies, the pizzeria’s Web page is intricately designed. I click on a huge red Pizza button three times, and an animation of Vinny appears, dancing a jig.

One of my co-hackers, who wears hockey shoulder pads when he uses the computer, cheers. “Tubular! The new guy hacked us some ’za!”

“Come on,” I mumble as bullets ricochet around me. “Come on  . . .”

The Navy destroyer’s screen shows a bright-green loading bar ticking toward a hundred per cent. I’m running out of time, and the computer rumbles as it processes the file, roaring like an idling motorcycle engine, which is the sound of the Internet loading.

The file is gigantic, containing the complete financial records of every single man, woman, and child on planet Earth, which is why it’s an incomprehensibly large two gigabytes.

“Two gigas,” I say. “The biggest damn file ever put on the Net.”

A 3-D model of a city street rotates on the screen. Using a mouse that clicks as loud and forcefully as a large stapler, I select the block where I suspect the rogue eco-terrorist is hiding. The street fills with green blocky renderings of people, indistinguishable from one another, except that some of the renderings have large triangular boobs, a detail that is important for crime-fighting.

“And now I’ll just hack this mainframe and activate the scanner,” I say to the Joint Chiefs and President Will Clonton.

I click, and one of the green people flashes red. It’s the eco-terrorist, immediately identified—she’s red because she’s bad, and she’s a she, because of the triangular boobs.

I am murdered by a sinister computer program that uses the Internet to zap my head via a wireless telephone. Green lightning crackles and courses through my entire body, and I collapse with a sizzle on the ground, with no visible wounds.

“They’ve hacked me . . . to death,” are my dying words, or so they think. . . .

“The disk! No! He’s got the disk!”

I admire the CD, marked “$$$.FILE,” and smile. As a crooked ex-C.I.A. agent/computer expert who is still fighting the Cold War, I know that millions of dollars have been hacked onto this disk. And now that I have it I simply need to hack the disk on my home computer, and the money will be hacked into my checking account.

I laugh. Looks like this old dog can still pull off the perfect digi-crime. ♦

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By Françoise Mouly

By Evan Waite

By Gerald Marzorati

Finternet: the financial system for the future

Advances in digital technology have transformed people's lives in recent decades. But large swathes of the financial system are stuck in the past. Many transactions still take days to complete and rely on time-consuming clearing, messaging and settlement systems and physical paper trails. Improving the functioning of the financial system is thus an important public policy objective. But building a financial system fit for the future requires a vision for what we want to achieve.

Contribution

We propose the concept of the "Finternet" as a vision for the future financial system: multiple financial ecosystems interconnected with each other – much like the internet. The Finternet would be designed to empower individuals and businesses by placing them at the centre of their financial lives. Unified ledgers are a promising vehicle to turn this vision into reality. Grounded on a digital-first approach and leveraging tokenisation, unified ledgers would improve existing financial transactions, but also make entirely new financial products and transactions possible. We describe the economic rationale for the Finternet as well as its required technical, regulatory and legal building blocks. In addition, we lay out eight fundamental design considerations that we feel should be a core part of the future financial system.

We identify three necessary components: an efficient economic and financial architecture, the application of cutting-edge digital technology and a robust legal and governance framework. Unified ledgers are a promising vehicle to deliver on all three. In particular, by bringing together multiple financial assets in a single venue, they could vastly reduce the need for lengthy messaging and clearing processes, thereby delivering more efficient and reliable services for users.

This paper lays out a vision for the Finternet: multiple financial ecosystems interconnected with each other, much like the internet, designed to empower individuals and businesses by placing them at the centre of their financial lives. It advocates for a user-centric approach that lowers barriers between financial services and systems, thus promoting access for all. The envisioned system leverages innovative technologies such as tokenisation and unified ledgers, underpinned by a robust economic and regulatory framework, to dramatically expand the range and quality of financial services. This integration aims to foster greater participation, offer more personalised services and improve speed and reliability, all while reducing costs for end users. Most of the technology needed to achieve this vision exists and is fast improving, driven by efforts around the world. This paper provides a blueprint for how key technical characteristics like interoperability, verifiability, programmability, immutability, finality, evolvability, modularity, scalability, security and privacy can be incorporated, and how varied governance norms can be embedded. Delivering this vision requires proactive collaboration between public authorities and private sector institutions. The paper serves as a call for action for these entities to establish a strong foundation. This would pave the way for a user-centric, unified and universal financial ecosystem brought into the digital era that is inclusive, innovative, participatory, accessible and affordable, and leaves no one behind.

JEL classification: E42, F33, G21, G23

Keywords: payment systems, financial system, financial intermediaries, financial instruments, currency, digital innovation, unified ledgers, tokenisation

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