A Nation Online: Living In the World Wide Web
by Diana Sanders

Welcome to the 21st century, where computers rule, and everything analog or manual is a thing of the past. It is the age of everything digital. HD TV, DVDs, the iPod, the BlackBerry, the cell phone and, somewhere in between, the Internet.

What happened to going to the library the old fashioned way and manually searching through the shelves for books and encyclopedias? What happened to writing personal letters, sealing, stamping and mailing? Ways of life once universally accepted have changed course with the turn of the century. No longer do individuals need to go to great lengths to locate information, or shop, either for necessities or for the objects of their wants and desires. Nowadays, everything is available with just a simple click of a mouse.

When the 1900s first rolled in, the telephone and electric lights seemed magical. Radio, more magical still, came along, then television. In the waning years of the 20th century computers burst on the scene and caused an unprecedented change in society. Manual labor once meant performing tasks that required more muscle than thought. Now many factories hold digitally enhanced machines that complete every imaginable or even unimaginable task almost instantaneously. Perhaps the only thing computers lack is a brain of their own, and even that might be conceivable in the coming years.

The Internet is many things, but it was never a one-man show. At no point can this massive creation trace its roots back to one single source. No one source can trace back its roots to this massive creation. And while jokes about “Al Gore’s great invention” by funnymen Jay Leno and David Letterman brought out a few laughs, the reality is not so clear-cut. What we do know is that the concept started in the 1960s, when the different technologies such as the ARPANET and Interface Message Processors came together and evolved into what is now commonly known as the Internet.

Some 40 years later, many Americans take advantage of the worldwide communication system known as the Internet that provides a link for the entire globe. Geographic location is simply no longer significant. Instant messaging and e-mail span the oceans that separate the seven continents of the planet.

If the teens of today take the Internet for granted, who can blame them? After all, most teenagers never had to hand-write letters that were delivered by riders on horseback. Instead, their relationships through the computer screen are instantaneous. And the Internet has brought about all sorts of symbols and acronyms that convey emotion, or at least attempt to, such as :-) or :-( and IMHO (in my humble opinion) or LOL (laughing out loud). This level of “personal relationship” might seem incongruous to some older people, who are used to actual one-on-one interaction, but as they say, “times are-a changing.”

Many people place more credence in numbers than in words, so here are a few: in the United States alone there are 203,576,811 Internet users as of October 2005, out of a total population of 296,208,476. These numbers, provided by Nielsen NetRatings, the international audience measurement standard for the Internet, have increased markedly since the number of Internet users was estimated at 95,354,000 in 2000. The figures tell us that some 70 percent of the American population is experiencing the world online—the more appropriate since the Internet is, in fact, the World Wide Web.

China follows the United States in number of Internet users as of 2005, followed by Japan, then Germany to round out the top four. Other countries are not far behind. The Internet is conquering the planet all the way through the Third World, and doing so at high speed.

The world at high speed is much more convenient than at slow speed. Broadband, as opposed to narrowband is then much more favored, and the numbers agree. An average 39 million Internet users in the United States connected via broadband in a test conducted in 2003, and the numbers are increasing. Year by year, there has been a 49 percent increase in users of broadband in the home. As a result dial-up and other narrowband providers have seen use of their services decline by some 12 percent.

The Shopper, the Blogger and the future Journalist

Nearly every American seems to go shopping during the holiday season. However, if you think the malls were unbearable, the streets chaotic, and the roads exasperating, you are only partially correct. If the online world could be described similarly, perhaps we would need a new vocabulary to describe massive, unbelievably large numbers of customers. Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving when shoppers jam stores and move merchants into the black by making large numbers of purchases, some for large sums of money, is being given a run for its money by the emerging Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving and the first true online shopping day of the year. This year, there was a 29 percent increase in online shopping on Cyber Monday, when some workers take advantage of high speed Internet at the workplace for personal benefit. One in every three people use online search engines while engaging in an online shopping spree. Nielson reported that Google leads the search engines, followed by Yahoo and MSN.

This year, 43 percent of consumers shopped online during the holiday season, and the number increases every year. It’s not surprising. With gas prices at their highest, temperatures at their lowest and store lines at their longest, who wouldn’t want to shop while enjoying the comforts of home, wearing pajamas and with Oprah in the background?

The Internet’s effects aren’t confined to online shopping, rather than going to a store. With the invention of the television, people began to speculate the effect this new product would have on radio and movies. Would television kill radio and movies? The impact of the Internet on the world of print raises similar issues. Online journalism is leaving print media wondering if they are slowly getting lost in the pages of history. After all, the geographic range of an online journalist is limitless, in contrast to local or even national newspapers that can reach only a certain number of readers in a limited number of locations. But like everything else, online journalism has drawbacks as well as advantages.

A citizen journalist with his or her own Web log (“blog”) need not have a degree, or even a clue about the craft of journalism. The idea of journalists as the “fourth estate” dates back to the French Revolution of 1789, and is still active today, many believe. With their watchdog powers, journalists control and shape not only public opinion, but also public knowledge. How accountable can an unknown source be? How can net surfers tell the difference between opinion and fact, especially since opinion, by definition, always carries with it some degree of bias?

While many publications are joining the Internet, bloggers still publish their own “news” throughout the Net. Even so, those who think that the Internet is the start of a new world that will affect the future of traditional journalism need not worry. While television affected newspapers and radio, it did not destroy either medium. The number of radio listeners, for example, is at an all time high. Print news is still regarded as a source of accurate, objective, and hard news, in most cases. Although even daily newspapers cannot compare with the Internet’s instantaneous dissemination of news, people still buy newspapers anyway. To many people, information seems more real when it comes from a printing press to a newspaper delivery truck and then into their hands.

The Internet revolutionized the already technologically advanced Western world. Its impacts are not only present in the business and economic fields, but also in the social community. Its use of online tools has caused a vast alteration in the way society operates. From welcoming new vocabulary into the English language and making the word dotcom an ordinary term to creating a global instantaneous postal system, we seem to be at just the beginning of a truly wireless networked world. It is a system that provides every convenience by forming links to almost every possible location on the planet.

If technology is a growing seed, then its growth is drastic and profound. Society’s attachment to the Internet already has a firm hold. We have become a nation that tends to rely on the Internet for all the world’s questions and answers. With the direct increase of Internet IP registrations and user rates, the next decade might just be a little too dependent on the onscreen world. And while the reliability of that world is promising, some wonder what the world would be like without this incredible development. We don’t know the answer to that one, but perhaps you can Google it. While you’re at it, check out the Gazette Web site at www.qgazette.com