The Global Effects Of The Internet On Society

Uploaded on 2023-12-12 in TECHNOLOGY--Developments, Education & Research

The Global Effects Of The Internet On Society

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The Internet has undoubtedly become one of the most significant technological advances of our time, affecting almost every aspect of our lives. It has profoundly impacted our world, transforming how we communicate, learn, work, manage our finances, access entertainment, and shop. It has made our lives more convenient and connected and will continue to evolve and shape our future in countless ways.

However, the impact of the Internet on society has been both positive and negative, and it continues to shape our world in ways that we are still only beginning to understand. This is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was a driver of the technological transformation from the Industrial Age.

The Industrial Age is generally agrees to have spanned from about 1760 to 1840, about eighty years. The Internet is a global network of inter-linked networks that mainly provides global wireless interactive communication. Though the Internet was first deployed in 1969, it was only in the 1990s that it became available to the public.

So much so that, with the exception of themost remote geographic comminuitaes and very small childrens, it’s safe to say that almost the entire humanity is now connected to the Internet. And the imocat of this rapid transformation has not had a uniformly beneficial impact on society.

One of the most significant concerns is the impact it has had on privacy and security. With the increasing amount of personal information that is shared online, there is a growing risk of identity theft, cyberbullying, and other forms of online harassment.

General Internet Effects

The Internet has undoubtedly become one of the most significant technological advances of our time, affecting almost every aspect of our lives. The impact of the Internet on society has been both positive and negative, and it continues to shape our world in ways that we are still only beginning to understand.

Positive Aspects of the Internet

On the positive side, the Internet has revolutionised the way we communicate, learn, work, and socialise. It has made it easier and faster to connect with people around the world and to access a vast amount of information on almost any topic. It has also opened up new opportunities for businesses and entrepreneurs to reach customers and markets they would never have had access to before.

It has altered society in many ways, from cultural exchange to social and economic development. It has rewritten many rules of engagement, and the Internet has enabled many new ways of thinking and connecting.

It has enabled us to access an almost infinite source of information, from news sites to local news sources. Now, we can access any news source from anywhere.

The speed of access varies by location, cost, and bandwidth availability, and Internet use has improved the quality of life for everyone. Those who want to read the news can choose the sources they want to use and what information they want to receive.

The Internet is helping young people voice their opinions and express their political freedoms. This is encouraging, as it shows the positive impact of the Internet on political freedom. Increasing access to faster, cheaper Internet connections may help to bring down powerful leaders

It’s been postulated that about 95% of all information available has been digitised and made accessible via the Internet. This processing system has also led to a complete transformation in communication, availability of knowledge as well as social interaction.

The Internet has also had a profound impact on education, making it possible for anyone with an Internet connection to learn new skills and acquire knowledge from anywhere in the world. Online courses, virtual classrooms, and educational websites have made education more accessible and flexible than ever before.
And so the positive impacts of the Internet include the following:

It provides effective communication using emailing and instant messaging services to any part of the world.
It improves business interactions and transactions, saving on vital time.
Banking and shopping online have made life less complicated.
You can access the latest news from any part of the world without depending on the TV or newspaper.
Education has received a huge boost as uncountable books and journals are available online from libraries across the world. This has made research easier. Students can now opt for online courses using the Internet.
Application for jobs has also become easier as most vacancies are advertised online with online applications becoming the norm.
Professionals can now exchange information and materials online, thus enhancing research.

Negative Aspects of the Internet

While it has made it easier to connect with people across the world, it has also led to a decline in face-to-face interactions and has made it easier for people to retreat into their own online communities, potentially leading to feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Another significant negative impact of the Internet has been on the job market. While it has created new opportunities, it has also led to the displacement of traditional jobs and has increased the pressure on workers to constantly update their skills to remain competitive in an increasingly digital economy.

Among the the negative impacts on society, one of the most significant concerns is the impact it has had on privacy and security. While it has brought us closer together and made our lives more convenient and efficient, it has also raised concerns about privacy, security, and social isolation.

With the increasing amount of personal information that is shared online, there is a growing risk of identity theft, cyber bullying, and other forms of online harassment.

As we continue to rely more heavily on the Internet, it is essential that we find ways to address these challenges and ensure that the benefits of this technology are realised by everyone. The negative impacts of the Internet on society also include:

Easy availability of illegal or inappropriate materials online that isn’t age-suitable.
Addiction to social networks can disrupt an individual’s life, both personally and professionally.
Some miscreants use the internet to hack into people’s accounts for spurious activities including stealing data or banking information.
Yet others have been known to misuse the Internet for spreading hate and terrorism, two dangerously catastrophic scenarios.

History of the Internet

The Internet is not really a new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969, but it was in the 1990s when it was privatised and released from the control of the US Department of Commerce that it diffused around the world at extraordinary speed: in 1996 the first survey of Internet users counted about 40 million; in 2013 they are over 2.5 billion, with China accounting for the largest number of Internet users.

Furthermore, for some time the spread of the Internet was limited by the difficulty to lay out land-based telecommunications infrastructure in the emerging countries.

This has changed with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, in 1991, there were about 16 million subscribers of wireless devices in the world, in 2013 they are close to 7 billion (in a planet of 7.7 billion human beings). Counting on the family and village uses of mobile phones, and taking into consideration the limited use of these devices among children under five years of age, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in the bandwidth as well as in the efficiency and price of the service.

At the heart of these communication networks the Internet ensures the production, distribution, and use of digitised information in all formats.

According to the study published by Martin Hilbert in Science 95 percent of all information existing in the planet is digitised, and most of it is accessible on the Internet and other computer networks. The speed and scope of the transformation of our communication environment by Internet and wireless communication has triggered all kind of utopian and dystopian perceptions around the world. Some commentators say that the populat media promotes the distorted perception by dwelling into scary reports on the basis of anecdotal observation and biased commentary. If there is a topic in which social sciences, in their diversity, should contribute to the full understanding of the world in which we live, it is precisely the area that has come to be known as Internet Studies.

In fact, academic research reveals a great deal on the interaction between Internet and society, on the basis of methodologically rigorous empirical research conducted in a plurality of cultural and institutional contexts.

Any process of major technological change generates its own mythology. In part because it comes into practice before scientists can assess its effects and implications, so there is always a gap between social change and its understanding. For example, media often reports that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of alienation, isolation, depression, and withdrawal from society. In fact, available evidence shows that there is either no relationship or a positive cumulative relationship between the Internet use and the intensity of sociability. However, academic research has observed that, overall, the more sociable people are, the more they use the Internet, and the more they use the Internet, the more they increase their sociability online and offline, their civic engagement, and the intensity of family and friendship relationships, in all cultures.

In order to fully understand the effects of the Internet on society, we should remember that technology is material culture. It is produced in a social process in a given institutional environment on the basis of the ideas, values, interests, and knowledge of their producers, both their early producers and their subsequent producers.

In this process we must include the users of the technology, who appropriate and adapt the technology rather than adopting it, and by so doing they modify it and produce it in an endless process of interaction between technological production and social use. So, to assess the relevance of Internet in society we must recall the specific characteristics of Internet as a technology. Then we must place it in the context of the transformation of the overall social structure, as well as in relationship to the culture characteristic of this social structure. Indeed, we live in a new social structure, the global network society, characterised by the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy.

The expansion of the Internet from the mid-1990s onward resulted from the combination of three main factors:

The technological discovery of the World Wide Web: Most often credited to by Tim Berners-Lee and his willingness to distribute the source code to improve it by the open-source contribution of a global community of users, in continuity with the openness of the TCP/IP Internet protocols. The web keeps running under the same principle of open source. And two-thirds of web servers are operated by an open-source server program.

Institutional change in the management of the Internet: Keeping it under the loose management of the global Internet community, privatising it, and allowing both commercial uses and cooperative uses.

Major changes in social structure, culture, and social behaviour: Networking as a prevalent organisational form; individuation as the main orientation of social behaviour; and the culture of autonomy as the culture of the network society.

Our society is a network society; constructed around personal and organisational networks powered by digital networks and communicated by the Internet. And because networks are global and know no boundaries, the network society is a global network society. This historically specific social structure resulted from the interaction between the emerging technological paradigm based on the digital revolution and some major sociocultural changes.

A primary dimension of these changes is what has been labelled the rise of the 'me-centered' society, or, in sociological terms, the process of individuation, the decline of community understood in terms of space, work, family, and ascription in general.

This is not the end of community, and not the end of place-based interaction, but there is a shift toward the reconstruction of social relationships, including strong cultural and personal ties that could be considered a form of community, on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects. The process of individuation is not just a matter of cultural evolution, it is materially produced by the new forms of organising economic activities, and social and political life. It is based on the transformation of metropolitan life, work and economic activity. And there has been a rise of the networked enterprise and networked work processes, culture and communication and a significant shift from mass communication based on mass media to mass self-communication based on the Internet.

Sociability is reconstructed as networked individualism and community through a quest for like-minded individuals in a process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace and the local space.

A major study by Michael Willmott for the British Computer Society has shown a positive correlation, for individuals and for countries, between the frequency and intensity of the use of the Internet and the psychological indicators of personal happiness. He used global data for 35,000 people obtained from the World Wide Survey of the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2007.

Controlling for other factors, the study showed that Internet use empowers people by increasing their feelings of security, personal freedom, and influence, all feelings that have a positive effect on happiness and personal well-being.

The effect is particularly positive for people with lower income and who are less qualified, for people in the developing world, and for women. Age does not affect the positive relationship; it is significant for all ages. There is increasing evidence of the direct relationship between the Internet and the rise of social autonomy. Using factor analysis six major types of autonomy based on projects of individuals according to their practices have been identified:

Professional development
Communicative autonomy
Entrepreneurship
Autonomy of the body
Sociopolitical participation
Personal, individual autonomy

These six types of autonomous practices were statistically independent among themselves. But each one of them correlated positively with Internet use in statistically significant terms, in a self-reinforcing loop.

This is an important finding, because if the dominant cultural trend in our society is the search for autonomy, and if the Internet powers this search, then we are moving toward a society of assertive individuals and cultural freedom, regardless of the barriers of rigid social organisations inherited from the Industrial Age.

From this Internet-based culture of autonomy have emerged a new kind of sociability, networked sociability, and a new kind of sociopolitical practice, networked social movements and networked democracy. In terms of users it reached 1 billion by September 2010, with Facebook accounting for about half of it. In 2013 it has almost doubled, particularly because of increasing use in China, India, and Latin America.

There is indeed a great diversity of social networking sites (SNS) by countries and cultures. Facebook, started for Harvard-only members in 2004, is present in most of the world, but QQ, Cyworld, and Baidu dominate in China; Orkut in Brazil; Mixi in Japan, among many others. In terms of demographics, age is the main differential factor in the use of Social Network Service (SNS), with a drop of frequency of use after 50 years of age, and particularly 65.

But this is not just a teenager’s activity. The main Facebook US category is in the age group 35–44, whose frequency of use of the site is higher than for younger people. Nearly 60 percent of adults in the US have at least one SNS profile, 30 percent two, and 15 percent three or more. Females are as present as males, except when in a society there is a general gender gap.

Thus, the most important activity on the Internet at this point in time goes through social networking, and SNS have become the chosen platforms for all kind of activities, not just personal friendships or chatting, but for marketing, e-commerce, education, cultural creativity, media and entertainment distribution, health applications, and sociopolitical activism.

This is a significant trend for society at large. Social networking sites are constructed by users themselves building on specific criteria of grouping. There is entrepreneurship in the process of creating sites, then people choose according to their interests and projects. Networks are tailored by people themselves with different levels of profiling and privacy.

The key to success is not anonymity, but on the contrary, self-presentation of a real person connecting to real people (in some cases people are excluded from the SNS when they fake their identity).

Consequently, it is a self-constructed society by networking connecting to other networks. But this is not a virtual society. There is a close connection between virtual networks and networks in life at large. This is a hybrid world, a real world, not a virtual world or a segregated world.

People build networks to be with others, and to be with others they want to be with on the basis of criteria that include those people who they already know (a selected sub-segment). Most users go on the site every day. It is permanent connectivity. If we needed an answer to what happened to sociability in the Internet world, it is this:

There is a dramatic increase in sociability, but a different kind of sociability, facilitated and dynamised by permanent connectivity and social networking on the web.

Based on the time when Facebook was still releasing data (this time is now gone) we know that in 2009 users spent 500 billion minutes per month. This is not just about friendship or interpersonal communication. People do things together, share, act, exactly as in society, although the personal dimension is always there. Thus, in the US 38 percent of adults share content, 21 percent remix, 14 percent blog, and this is growing exponentially, with development of technology, software, and SNS entrepreneurial initiatives. On Facebook, in 2009 the average user was connected to 60 pages, groups, and events, people interacted per month to 160 million objects (pages, groups, events), the average user created 70 pieces of content per month, and there were 25 billion pieces of content shared per month (web links, news stories, blogs posts, notes, photos).

SNS are living spaces connecting all dimensions of people’s experience. This transforms culture because people share experience with a low emotional cost, while saving energy and effort. They transcend time and space, yet they produce content, set up links, and connect practices. It is a constantly networked world in every dimension of human experience. They co-evolve in permanent, multiple interaction. But they choose the terms of their co-evolution. Thus, people live their physical lives but increasingly connect on multiple dimensions in SNS.

Paradoxically, the virtual life is more social than the physical life, now individualised by the organisation of work and urban living. But people do not live a virtual reality, indeed it is a real virtuality, since social practices, sharing, mixing, and living in society is facilitated in the virtuality, sometimes refrred to as the “space of flows”. Because people are increasingly at ease in the multitextuality and multidimensionality of the web, marketers, work organisations, service agencies, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the Internet, less and less setting up alternative sites, more and more being present in the networks that people construct by themselves and for themselves.

And with the help of Internet social networking entrepreneurs, some of whom became billionaires in the process, are actually selling freedom and the possibility of the autonomous construction of lives. This is the liberating potential of the Internet made material practice by these social networking sites. The largest of these social networking sites are usually bounded social spaces managed by a single dominant company. However, if the company tries to impede free communication it may lose many of its users, because the entry barriers in this industry are very low. Technology entrepreneurs can set up a site on the Internet and attract escapees from a more restricted Internet space with little capital, as happened to AOL and other networking sites of the first generation, and as could happen to Facebook or any other SNS if they are tempted to tinker with the rules of openness.

SNS are often a business, but they are in the business of selling freedom, free expression, chosen sociability. When they tinker with this promise they risk their hollowing by net citizens migrating with their friends to more friendly virtual lands.

Perhaps the most telling expression of this new freedom is the transformation of sociopolitical practices on the Internet. Power and counterpower, the foundational relationships of society, are constructed in the human mind, through the construction of meaning and the processing of information according to certain sets of values and interests.

Ideological systems and the mass media have been key tools of mediating communication and asserting power, and still are. But the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy, has found in Internet and mobile communication networks a major medium of mass self-communication and self-organisation.

The key source for the social production of meaning is the process of socialised communication - communication as the process of sharing meaning through the exchange of information. Socialised communication is the one that exists in the public realm, that has the potential of reaching society at large. Therefore, the battle over the human mind is largely played out in the process of socialised communication. And this is particularly so in the network society, the social structure of the Information Age, which is characterised by the pervasiveness of communication networks in a multimodal hypertext.

The ongoing transformation of communication technology in the digital age extends the reach of communication media to all domains of social life in a network that is at the same time global and local, generic and customised, in an ever-changing pattern. As a result, power relations, that is the relations that constitute the foundation of all societies, as well as the processes challenging institutionalised power relations, are increasingly shaped and decided in the communication field.

Meaningful, conscious communication is what makes humans human. Thus, any major transformation in the technology and organisation of communication is of utmost relevance for social change.

Over the last four decades the advent of the Internet and of wireless communication has shifted the communication process in society at large from mass communication to mass self-communication. This is from a message sent from one to many with little interactivity to a system based on messages from many to many, multimodal, in chosen time, and with interactivity, so that senders are receivers and receivers are senders. And both have access to a multimodal hypertext in the web that constitutes the endlessly changing backbone of communication processes.

The transformation of communication from mass communication to mass self-communication has contributed decisively to alter the process of social change.

As power relationships have always been based on the control of communication and information that feed the neural networks constitutive of the human mind, the rise of horizontal networks of communication has created a new landscape of social and political change by the process of disintermediation of the government and corporate controls over communication. This is the power of the network, as social actors build their own networks on the basis of their projects, values, and interests. The outcome of these processes is open ended and dependent on specific contexts.

Freedom, in this case freedom of communicate, does not say anything on the uses of freedom in society. This is to be established by scholarly research. But we need to start from this major historical phenomenon: the building of a global communication network based on the Internet, a technology that embodies the culture of freedom that was at its source. In the first decade of the twenty-first century there have been multiple social movements around the world that have used the Internet as their space of formation and permanent connectivity, among the movements and with society at large. These networked social movements, formed in the social networking sites on the Internet, have mobilised in the urban space and in the institutional space, inducing new forms of social movements that are the main actors of social change in the network society.

Networked social movements have been particularly active since 2010, and especially in the attempted so-called 'Arab Spring' uprisings against dictatorships; in Europe and the US as forms of protest against the management of the financial crisis; in Brazil; in Turkey; in Mexico; and in highly diverse institutional contexts and economic conditions. It is precisely the similarity of the movements in extremely different contexts that allows the formulation of the hypothesis that this is the pattern of social movements characteristic of the global network society.

In all cases we observe the capacity of these movements for self-organisation, without a central leadership, on the basis of a spontaneous emotional movement.

In all cases there is a connection between Internet-based communication, mobile networks, and the mass media in different forms, feeding into each other and amplifying the movement locally and globally. These movements take place in the context of exploitation and oppression, social tensions and social struggles; but struggles that were not able to successfully challenge the state in other instances of revolt are now powered by the tools of mass self-communication.

It is not the technology that induces the movements, but without the technology social movements would not take the present form of being a challenge to state power. The fact is that technology is material culture and the Internet materialised the culture of freedom that, as it has been documented, emerged on American campuses in the 1960s.

This culture-made technology is at the source of the new wave of social movements that exemplify the depth of the global impact of the Internet in all spheres of social organisation, affecting particularly power relationships, the foundation of the institutions of society.

Conclusion

The Internet, as all technologies, does not produce effects by itself. Yet, it has specific effects in altering the capacity of the communication system to be organised around flows that are interactive, multimodal, asynchronous or synchronous, global or local, and from many to many, from people to people, from people to objects, and from objects to objects, increasingly relying on the semantic web.

What is clear is that without the Internet we would not have seen the large-scale development of networking as the fundamental mechanism of social structuring and social change in every domain of social life.

The Internet, the World Wide Web, and a variety of networks increasingly based on wireless platforms constitute the technological infrastructure of the network society, as the electrical grid and the electrical engine were the support system for the form of social organisation that we conceptualised as the industrial society.

Thus, as a social construction, this technological system is open ended, as the network society is an open-ended form of social organisation that conveys the best and the worse in humankind. Yet, the global network society is our society, and the understanding of its logic on the basis of the interaction between culture, organisation, and technology in the formation and development of social and technological networks is a key field of research in the twenty-first century.

A digital communication technology that is already a second skin for young people, yet it continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand. And so the Internet has profoundly impacted our world, transforming how we communicate, learn, work, manage our finances, access entertainment, and shop.

It has made our lives more convenient and connected and will continue to evolve and shape our future in countless ways.

References:

BBVA: Science: LinkedIn:

Conifer: TechBusiness:

AsiaNet: InternetSociety:

Conifer: MIT Tech Review:

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