Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Understanding "human" aspects in using the Internet.

Internet is truly an infrastructure for the information age. As one of the major technology medium, Internet has been major areas of research. It is a medium of effective communications, flexible in cost and features, not specific piece of software or hardware and is not a single network but group of globally collection either big or small logical connected networks. It is not owned by any organization or any individual or any government,corporation or university. Internet is not the same everywhere. The worldwide Internet population is growing and rapid pace. Number of humans getting access to the information, learning, and desire of going online is booming like never before. From the developed countries to developing countries As late 1988, only few countries were connected to Internet. Now, According to the 2004 CIA World Factbook, over 50 countries have at least one million humans using Internet.


One of the fascinating thing about Internet is that it comes with outstanding tools for the usage in regards to recreation, education, society and much more. Current estimated statistics has shown that more than 63 million humans using Internet in homes and the importance of Internet in day to day activities are growing. There is almost nothing which cannot be accomplished from the comfort zone of home, paying bills, research work, buying,selling, updating, uploading, downloading, shopping and most importantly communicating with your family and friends half way across the world. Together with the positive growth, its negative effects are growing too.



According to U.S. Department of Justice, Internet is an anonymous and effective way for many predators to find and groom children for illegal activities. The fear of using internet is further amplified by social disintegration which could be result of such an activities. The distance has been shortened from family, friends and from seeking information which can be seen as the replacement of very important day to day interactions. Boundaries of time, distance and identity are broken from the transfer of simple application like e-mail to complex world of virtual communities. Although email are used conveniently and humans using it has become overwhelming with number one priority, it can sometime cause great problems with Junk, Spams and theft. Privacy and Security are major concern for understanding behavior of humans in Internet.


With the novelty and convenience of Internet, it has lulled humans with the sense of dependency to greater extent. Persistent desire to go on the Internet, Play games online, visit restricted web contents, chatting longer than expected, do shopping more than the conversation with husband are all some of the symptoms of negative behaviors in Internet; which shows that future of communication is going towards the more on understanding “human aspects” of using Internet.

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