THE IMPACT OF THE INTERNET ON OUR DAILY LIFE by Markus Temmel, Martina Theuermann, Eva Ukowitz, Tanja Vogrin
It is very difficult to differ between the good and bad aspects of internet. There are good and bad things about every service of the internet.
If you chat you can meet many interesting people which come from all over the world. Distance is not important any more. You can meet people which are not able to find friends in reality because of their appearance. In cyberspace there is no appearance - the character of a person counts. But you also can meet people, who cheat on you and fool you. That can be funny, but it is not if you want to meet “real”, devine friends. Sometimes, if you meet your online friends it can be very thrilling. You make your own picture of your chat-partner in your mind. And what about your friends in reality? There will be less time left for them, if you sit in front of the PC all the day. But there is also the possibility to make your real friends your online-friends.
Searching for information you will find a huge amount of it on every topic you are searching for. This can be very comfortable. You only have to type in a word and you will find everything about it. But be careful! There is also false information. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between true and false information.
Often you have the possibility to listen to music on the internet. You may also download it for free. That is very cheap because you only have to pay the telephone-costs and the music is for free. What does that mean for the musicians? They will not get all their money they would normally receive. That is not too dangerous for the well-known musicians but it can become dangerous to the little ones who cannot afford to lose a part of their income.
What about communicating with an online-friend? You will send him/her an email. It is faster than a letter, cheaper than a telephone call and easier to use than a radio set. But: Is the encryption-code secure enough? Many hackers will try to read the message you send to your friends. This leads to the next problem of the internet: How can you provide privacy in a non- private world? Everybody wants to know everything about everyone. How can you say: “This is my private zone, nobody can get into it.” A few minutes later someone will try to get into the privacy-zone. Why? Everyone thinks there must be something very interesting and secret inside this zone. Nothing is more interesting than a forbidden place. There is some special anonymity about the internet. You may tell anything about yourself and everyone will believe you – if nobody checks the information. You also may swap your gender and nobody will recognize it.