Internet

How the Internet Impacts on Our Daily Life

The Internet is a phenomenon that revolutionized the life in the world transforming habits and customs.

The Internet has become an integral part of our life! Nowadays four out of five adults consider network access as a human right. Certainly, the Internet is having a profound positive as well as negative impact on the behaviour of individuals, society, governments, and economics.

The Internet has facilitated communication, but it has created a challenge for the communication companies; since 2012, for example, over a third of international calls are made through Skype. It popularized the information consumed from society, however it caused a rupture in the traditional press; The Encyclopaedia Britannica, after 244 years, is no longer printed, attributing this to the growth of Wikipedia. It also created new forms of entertainment, but it generated an irreversible impact on television; through the YouTube channels, for example, we can have access to the news, documentaries and other many different forms of entertainment. The Internet has brought difficulties for authoritarian governments, but it allowed new forms of espionage and invasion of privacy; the Arab revolution was largely made possible by the popular use of the Internet, the same use that is allowing the US government to spy on other individuals. If on one hand, it has become one of the biggest drivers of the global economy, other companies were forced to modernize in order not to become forgotten; annually, over £800 billion are moved globally through e-commerce. The Internet has also contributed greatly in education with a number of educational videos available online disproportionately larger than the number of printed educational books; the Khan Academy videos on YouTube, for example. However, with access to educational content, the Internet has facilitated the exposure of pornographic, racist, and other forms of radicalism.

"The Internet will become as electricity, less visible, but more deeply rooted in peoples' lives, for good and for ill." This is one of the main predictions for the next 10 years on the online world revealed in a study placed online by the Pew Research Center and Elon University (PDF) in North Carolina, USA (2014), when it celebrates 25 years on the emergence World Wide Web.

In the future, greater access to information will make the users more aware of their world and their behaviour; there will be an increased awareness and political action. However, more civil rebellions like that mentioned above, the “Arab Spring". People will be more informed and have the capacity to exchange comments about their concerns. The study says that with this proximity, the ability to organise and react will be reinforced.

The study reveals also a "black side" of the technological future. The inequalities will be increased through the information exchanged between surfers, "resulting in resentment and possible violence". "The laziness, harassment, stalking, stupidity, porn, dirty tricks, crime will be much more accessible and those who will practice them will have a new ability to make others' lives miserable." These become realities as cyber terrorism or breaches of privacy.

The Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells, author of the publication "Cambio", launched on the Internet in May 2014, questions the hypothesis that intensive Internet use increases the risk of alienation, isolation, depression and social withdrawal.

Castells concludes through the available data that there is no relationship between Internet use and social life, or when there is it, the effect is positive and cumulative. "In general the most sociable people are those who use the Internet more; the more they use, the more increase their sociability within and outside the network, their civic responsibility and the strength of their relationships