How internet affects our lives

List of 10 Positive and Negative Effects of the Internet

There’s no doubt that technology has changed our lives. Of course by now we thought we’d be living in a Jetsons fantasy with flying cars and robotic maids. But hey, we’re getting close with self-driving Teslas and Roombas. The invention of the internet was something we could have never expected, though. From being able to Google how to hard boil an egg (because, yeah, sometimes you have to Google simple things like that) to watching a YouTube video on how to change the battery in the fob of your car key, the internet has changed the way we live. But is that a good thing? With the good comes the bad, and unfortunately, the internet is a little bit of both.

We’ve come up with a list of the top 10 positive and negative effects of the internet. Don’t worry, we’ll start with the good parts.

Positive Effects of the Internet

The Internet Can Keep Us Together

Communication is a part of human nature. The internet has become so embedded in every aspect of our daily lives that people of all ages have come to use it. The explosion of social media has brought everyone closer together. We’re able to keep up with our parents, grandparents, children, cousins and cross-country friends with just the swipe of a screen and tap of an app. It doesn’t just help us maintain relationships with the people we already know. We’re also able to meet new people and make new friends.

Thanks to the internet, it only takes seconds to deliver lengthy messages using social media. It’s given us an unlimited amount of ways to communicate in a simpler, more accessible and more immediate way. We can maintain relationships using our laptops, tablets, smartwatches and smartphones.

The Internet Can Redefine Business, Online Shopping and Mobile Banking Interactions and Transactions

Believe it or not, the internet is one of the driving factors boosting our economy. Especially in a world overrun by a pandemic, everything you could possibly want can be bought online.

The internet is not just for shopping and social media though. Businesses are utilizing the internet for their own benefit. Online applications are considered a norm when applying for jobs. That way, businesses can reach a wider audience when searching for highly-qualified candidates.

You can also use your website or social media accounts to show customers your content, products or overall brand. When you do this on social media, you’re able to connect with your followers and get a better understanding of the consumer. This doesn’t just strengthen your brand’s reputation and awareness, it also gives the business opportunity to improve what the shoppers are struggling with.

The Internet Can Encourage Creativity in Everyone

Self expression is one of the most important things you can do. And the internet can help. Through platforms like Facebook, YouTube and even TikTok, anyone with even an ounce of creativity can hone their skills and share them with friends and followers online.

Instead of suppressing creativity, technology enhances the creative process. It has inspired new careers and creations. From the first website made in 1991 to the creation of Google in 1998, to the explosion of TikTok in the 2010s, we can see how web design has completely changed. Designing websites requires the ability to brainstorm creatively, study and work on color theory, and entice users based on their wants, needs, and personal preference. To enhance the experience of users and to invite a rapid growth in website traffic, web designers began experimenting more with animations, colors, parallax layouts, content creation, and even e-commerce features such as one-click checkouts and paycheck scanners. This clearly tells us that the advancement in technology has definitely forced designers to become more creative and more user-experienced focused.

Businesses now have the opportunity to introduce and promote themselves more creatively using various platforms. Constant exposure to online content has helped businesses stay up-to-date with their competition, research the needs of consumers, and re-imagine content to suit the needs of their consumers.

The Internet Can Offer Limitless Avenues for Learning

The internet has completely changed the game for teachers. They’re able to provide access to material for their classes to students without wasting paper. And speaking of papers, students working on their own research papers don’t have to spend hours in the stacks searching for the perfect book to perfect their thesis anymore. With a few clicks of the keyboard, students can find almost anything they’re looking for online.

The Internet Can Improve the Health and Finance Sectors

In the finance sector, the internet has dramatically changed the cost and capabilities for marketing, distributing and servicing financial products. The internet also plays a major role in other segments of the industry, such as financial information and news, rating and comparison services, financial planning and investment banking.

Negative Effects of the Internet

It’s become second nature for society to check Facebook, Twitter and Instagram every chance they get, caring more about someone’s Man Crush Monday or who subtweeted whom on Twitter. We don’t realize how self-absorbed we’ve become, or how much we depend on the internet for everything. So, while there are a lot of pros to the ever-changing internet, there is bad alongside it, too.

The Internet Can Affect Our Health

The development of the internet would be far less detrimental to our health if we didn’t have smartphones, handheld tablets and computers that weigh less than a bottle of water. These devices steal our attention. Checking your texts turns into watching one funny video, which turns into a three-hour rabbit hole of what baby carrots are and why they’re even a thing. Suddenly it’s 2 a.m., and your eyes are totally strained from the blue light you’ve been staring at in your dark little room all night. This is called the digital eye. Symptoms of digital eye include dry eyes and blurred vision and can lead to pains in other areas of the body, like your head, neck and shoulders.

Too much use of your mobile gadgets can ultimately lead to incorrect posture (that’s right, sit up straight, we know you’re slouching). It’s no secret that most of our technology promotes a down-forward user position. Unfortunately, this puts unnecessary amounts of pressure on the neck and spine.

Using technology before bedtime could even cause a sleep disorder. This is due to the blue light emitted by mobile devices that stimulate the brain. This blue light is enough to disturb the body’s natural circadian rhythm. This disturbance can make the user struggle when trying to fall asleep and ultimately lead to being less alert the following day.

Too much internet can also lead to too little physical activity. The more we lead a sedentary life, the easier it is to acquire health problems like obesity.

The Internet Can Cause Social Media Addiction that Leads to Emotional Harm

It wasn’t long after the internet’s creation that social media came into play. Instead of caring about genuine interactions, we’ve come to obsess over likes and retweets and hearts and shares and comments and it creates a skewed self-image. Social media has set a standard for what is beautiful, for what is acceptable. It has introduced us to the concept of the how-to’s when it comes to our body and our appearance. In result, the algorithms of these social media applications lead us to the different tips in getting a perfect body without even working out or doing cardio exercises, a perfect skin care routine, a perfect summer body, a perfect brow shape, a perfect hair color for each season, a perfect diet or food supplement, and so much more! All these lead us to strive to perfect at least one or two of these “tips” and often get frustrated when we fail to achieve them.

The Internet Can Be a Source of Illegal and Inappropriate Materials Unsuitable for Young People

Not everything on the internet is made for everyone. But because everyone has access to the intent, it’s becoming increasingly easier for children to get their hands (and eyes) on inappropriate content. This content that’s not suitable for children has the power to introduce concepts to their minds that they’re not ready to manage or comprehend yet, thus causing them to grow up too quickly. Children and young people may not have found these things deliberately, but you can’t unsee things not meant for you.

The Internet May Become an Avenue for Cyber Crimes

Cyber crimes have created a major threat among us with thousands and thousands of user information stolen. Without the proper protection or awareness, hackers can steal confidential information straight from your computer.

The Internet Can Affect Children’s Development

It’s undeniable that the internet plays an important role in our day-to-day lives. What we need to focus on is how much screen time children get, because excessive use of the internet can negatively affect children’s development. Their attention span, memory skills, language acquisition and critical reasoning can all be hindered with too much tech.

It may seem like the easy solution to hand a crying kid an iPad with Peppa Pig playing, but these distracting gadgets aren’t the right way to parent. Technology isn’t just addicting for adults, and you don’t want to start children on something so engrossing so young.

The Impact of the Internet on Society: A Global Perspective

Introduction

The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the vector of technological transformation of the Industrial Age. This global network of computer networks, largely based nowadays on platforms of wireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time, transcending space. The Internet is not really a new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969 (Abbate 1999). But it was in the 1990s when it was privatized and released from the control of the U.S. 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 digitized information in all formats. According to the study published by Martin Hilbert in Science (Hilbert and LГіpez 2011), 95 percent of all information existing in the planet is digitized 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.

As in all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.

The media aggravate 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 named in academia as Internet Studies. Because, in fact, academic research knows 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 instance, media often report 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. We observe 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—with the exception of a couple of early studies of the Internet in the 1990s, corrected by their authors later (Castells 2001; Castells et al. 2007; Rainie and Wellman 2012; Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.).

Thus, the purpose of this chapter will be to summarize some of the key research findings on the social effects of the Internet relying on the evidence provided by some of the major institutions specialized in the social study of the Internet. More specifically, I will be using the data from the world at large: the World Internet Survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future, University of Southern California; the reports of the British Computer Society (BCS), using data from the World Values Survey of the University of Michigan; the Nielsen reports for a variety of countries; and the annual reports from the International Telecommunications Union. For data on the United States, I have used the Pew American Life and Internet Project of the Pew Institute. For the United Kingdom, the Oxford Internet Survey from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, as well as the Virtual Society Project from the Economic and Social Science Research Council. For Spain, the Project Internet Catalonia of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC); the various reports on the information society from Telefónica; and from the Orange Foundation. For Portugal, the Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC) in Lisbon. I would like to emphasize that most of the data in these reports converge toward similar trends. Thus I have selected for my analysis the findings that complement and reinforce each other, offering a consistent picture of the human experience on the Internet in spite of the human diversity.

Given the aim of this publication to reach a broad audience, I will not present in this text the data supporting the analysis presented here. Instead, I am referring the interested reader to the web sources of the research organizations mentioned above, as well as to selected bibliographic references discussing the empirical foundation of the social trends reported here.

Technologies of Freedom, the Network Society, and the Culture of Autonomy

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, characterized by the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy.

Internet is a technology of freedom, in the terms coined by Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1973, coming from a libertarian culture, paradoxically financed by the Pentagon for the benefit of scientists, engineers, and their students, with no direct military application in mind (Castells 2001). The expansion of the Internet from the mid-1990s onward resulted from the combination of three main factors:

I will elaborate on these major trends.

Our society is a network society; that is, a society constructed around personal and organizational 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 labeled 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 organizing economic activities, and social and political life, as I analyzed in my trilogy on the Information Age (Castells 1996–2003). It is based on the transformation of space (metropolitan life), work and economic activity (rise of the networked enterprise and networked work processes), culture and communication (shift from mass communication based on mass media to mass self-communication based on the Internet); on the crisis of the patriarchal family, with increasing autonomy of its individual members; the substitution of media politics for mass party politics; and globalization as the selective networking of places and processes throughout the planet.

But individuation does not mean isolation, or even less the end of community. 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. Individuation is the key process in constituting subjects (individual or collective), networking is the organizational form constructed by these subjects; this is the network society, and the form of sociability is what Rainie and Wellman (2012) conceptualized as networked individualism. Network technologies are of course the medium for this new social structure and this new culture (Papacharissi 2010).

As stated above, academic research has established that the Internet does not isolate people, nor does it reduce their sociability; it actually increases sociability, as shown by myself in my studies in Catalonia (Castells 2007), Rainie and Wellman in the United States (2012), Cardoso in Portugal (2010), and the World Internet Survey for the world at large (Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.). Furthermore, a major study by Michael Willmott for the British Computer Society (Trajectory Partnership 2010) 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. Why women? Because they are at the center of the network of their families, Internet helps them to organize their lives. Also, it helps them to overcome their isolation, particularly in patriarchal societies. The Internet also contributes to the rise of the culture of autonomy.

The key for the process of individuation is the construction of autonomy by social actors, who become subjects in the process. They do so by defining their specific projects in interaction with, but not submission to, the institutions of society. This is the case for a minority of individuals, but because of their capacity to lead and mobilize they introduce a new culture in every domain of social life: in work (entrepreneurship), in the media (the active audience), in the Internet (the creative user), in the market (the informed and proactive consumer), in education (students as informed critical thinkers, making possible the new frontier of e-learning and m-learning pedagogy), in health (the patient-centered health management system) in e-government (the informed, participatory citizen), in social movements (cultural change from the grassroots, as in feminism or environmentalism), and in politics (the independent-minded citizen able to participate in self-generated political networks).

There is increasing evidence of the direct relationship between the Internet and the rise of social autonomy. From 2002 to 2007 I directed in Catalonia one of the largest studies ever conducted in Europe on the Internet and society, based on 55,000 interviews, one-third of them face to face (IN3 2002–07). As part of this study, my collaborators and I compared the behavior of Internet users to non-Internet users in a sample of 3,000 people, representative of the population of Catalonia. Because in 2003 only about 40 percent of people were Internet users we could really compare the differences in social behavior for users and non-users, something that nowadays would be more difficult given the 79 percent penetration rate of the Internet in Catalonia. Although the data are relatively old, the findings are not, as more recent studies in other countries (particularly in Portugal) appear to confirm the observed trends. We constructed scales of autonomy in different dimensions. Only between 10 and 20 percent of the population, depending on dimensions, were in the high level of autonomy. But we focused on this active segment of the population to explore the role of the Internet in the construction of autonomy. Using factor analysis we identified six major types of autonomy based on projects of individuals according to their practices:

a) professional development
b) communicative autonomy
c) entrepreneurship
d) autonomy of the body
e) sociopolitical participation
f) 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 (time sequence): the more one person was autonomous, the more she/he used the web, and the more she/he used the web, the more autonomous she/he became (Castells et al. 2007). This is a major empirical 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 organizations 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. I will now turn to the analysis of these two fundamental trends at the source of current processes of social change worldwide.

The Rise of Social Network Sites on the Internet

Since 2002 (creation of Friendster, prior to Facebook) a new socio-technical revolution has taken place on the Internet: the rise of social network sites where now all human activities are present, from personal interaction to business, to work, to culture, to communication, to social movements, and to politics.

Social Network Sites are web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

(Boyd and Ellison 2007, 2)

Social networking uses, in time globally spent, surpassed e-mail in November 2007. It surpassed e-mail in number of users in July 2009. 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; etc. In terms of demographics, age is the main differential factor in the use of 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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. We observe no differences in education and class, but there is some class specialization of SNS, such as Myspace being lower than FB; LinkedIn is for professionals.

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. Let me explore the meaning of this trend on the basis of the still scant evidence.

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). So, 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, here it is:

There is a dramatic increase in sociability, but a different kind of sociability, facilitated and dynamized 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 U.S. 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 individualized by the organization 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, in what I called time ago the “space of flows” (Castells 1996).

Because people are increasingly at ease in the multi-textuality and multidimensionality of the web, marketers, work organizations, 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, with the help of Internet social networking entrepreneurs, some of whom become billionaires in the process, 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 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. A couple of technologically savvy youngsters with little capital can set up a site on the Internet and attract escapees from a more restricted Internet space, 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 (Facebook tried to make users pay and retracted within days). So, 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.

Communication Power: Mass-Self Communication and the Transformation of Politics

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 (Castells 2009).

Ideological apparatuses 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-organization.

The key source for the social production of meaning is the process of socialized communication. I define communication as the process of sharing meaning through the exchange of information. Socialized 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 socialized communication. And this is particularly so in the network society, the social structure of the Information Age, which is characterized 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 customized, 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 institutionalized 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 organization 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 mobilized 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 Arab revolutions against dictatorships; in Europe and the U.S. 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-organization, 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 (Internet and wireless communication) social movements would not take the present form of being a challenge to state power. The fact is that technology is material culture (ideas brought into the design) and the Internet materialized 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 organization, affecting particularly power relationships, the foundation of the institutions of society. (See case studies and an analytical perspective on the interaction between Internet and networked social movements in Castells 2012.)

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 organized 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. How these characteristics affect specific systems of social relationships has to be established by research, and this is what I tried to present in this text. 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 organization that we conceptualized 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 organization 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, organization, and technology in the formation and development of social and technological networks is a key field of research in the twenty-first century.

We can only make progress in our understanding through the cumulative effort of scholarly research. Only then we will be able to cut through the myths surrounding the key technology of our time. 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.

References

These references are in fact sources of more detailed references specific to each one of the topics analyzed in this text.

Abbate, Janet.
A Social History of the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison.
“Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007).

Cardoso, Gustavo, Angus Cheong, and Jeffrey Cole (eds).
World Wide Internet: Changing Societies, Economies and Cultures. Macau: University of Macau Press, 2009.

Castells, Manuel.
The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–2003.

———. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

———. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

———. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

Castells, Manuel, Imma Tubella, Teresa Sancho, and Meritxell Roca.

La transiciГіn a la sociedad red. Barcelona: Ariel, 2007.

Hilbert, Martin, and Priscilla LГіpez.
“The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information.” Science 332, no. 6025 (April 1, 2011): pp. 60–65.

Papacharissi, Zizi, ed.
The Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Networking Sites. Routledge, 2010.

Rainie. Lee, and Barry Wellman.
Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Trajectory Partnership (Michael Willmott and Paul Flatters).
The Information Dividend: Why IT Makes You “Happier.” Swindon: British Informatics Society Limited, 2010. http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/info-dividend-full-report.pdf

Selected Web References.В В Used as sources for analysis in the chapter

Learner Weblog

Education and Learning weblog

How internet is affecting our life

Jenny reflected on how she viewed the impact of internet on seniors here the internet and the older generation. Do old people need to be connected more actively via internet? What are the values of using internet in their connections? I don’t know, but old people could become rather lonely if they are isolated from the family, or the community. So, some connections using facebook, twitter, or other mobile technology may be helpful for some old people, in order for them to be part of the “virtual community”. Some old people might also be interested in reading and watching news and reading newspapers over the internet, as they could choose when and how they would do that at their own pace. The problem is: do they have the computer and technology skills in mastering such information and internet search? My limited experience with “teaching” elderly is: No. Internet is not that “easy” to learn, especially when old people are not educated in technology or having the computer literacies. May be they could learn using mobiles, but again the characters and image in mobiles may be too small for them to read. Some old people would still prefer to meet and socialize with others face-to-face, as evidenced in the small gatherings in malls, or eating out in the restaurants.

My parents didn’t use any computers, not even the internet. They didn’t even had the chance of receiving formal education. So where and how did they get the information when they were alive? And what were their source of knowledge and wisdom?

They got the wisdom from their parents, friends, and the informal “teaching” and learning at work or with their children, through doing, observation, experience and reflection of work and life. As they grew older, they became wiser, as they understood that life is a learning experience, and that they have transformed their knowledge into wisdom that inspired them to practice “peace of mind and acts of love” in their latter part of life.

Although we have become more educated, as compared to our ancestors, are we getting smarter, wiser?

With the introduction of new and emerging technology, mobile technology, and internet in particular, we have come to a point when most of our learning and values are being “challenged” by many others, including the formal authorities, experts, institutions, and knowledgeable others based on critical thinking, and creative collective inquiries, and communities discourse.

Here is an adapted and expanded version of a reflective writing (with my views and beliefs included). I got it from my beloved sister. I don’t know the source, but would like to acknowledge and attribute to the source.

Photo: from Flickr

Today we have higher buildings and wider highways, but shorter attention span and temperament, and narrower points of view.

We spend more, but enjoy less.

We have bigger houses, but smaller families.

We have more information and “knowledge”, but less “objective” judgement and tolerance.

We have more medicines, but less health.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.

We talk much, but we listen less.

We love only a little, but we hate a lot.

We reached the Moon and came back, but we found it too troublesome to cross our own street and meet our neighbours.

We have conquered the outer space, but not our inner space.

We have higher income, but less moral values.

We have increased public education on family values, but the divorce rate has also increased.

There are finer houses, but more broken homes.

We created more schools, but there are more failure drop-outs.

We showed our power and arrogance, but failed to acknowledge our own arrogance and ignorance.

We strived for liberty and freedom, but tried to convince others that they have to follow our orders.

We live our life by possessing and accumulating more materials and wealth, but we seem to have great difficulties in caring and loving our parents, partners, children and friends, or our colleagues and customers.

How about the following propositions?

Do you keep anything for a special occasion, because every day that you live is a special occasion.

Take out from your vocabulary phrases like “I will love him or her if he changes”. Instead, adopt a phrase like “I will change myself so I could love him or her now”

Tell your family and friends how much you love them.

Do not delay anything that could add laughter, joy and happiness to your life, and to your other family members’ life.

Every day, hour, minute and second is special… to you and to others who you love.

And you don’t know if it will be your last moment to share….

Those are the days belong to the past, in nostalgia. Here is the moment to share and celebrate life.

Search for truth, information and knowledge. Read more, think and reflect on what you have learnt. Sit on your front porch (including your blog, your Facebook, your Twitter, or your favorite social media site), and admire the views of nature and spaces (including the networks, the different social media)

Spend more time with your family, eat your favorite (healthy) food, visit the place you love. Play the music that you enjoy, and sing the songs that echoes with your mind.

Life is a chain of moments of joys, it isn’t only for survival.

Use your crystal goblets. Do not save your best perfume (your wisdom or knowledge), and use it every time you feel you want it.

If you like, share your wisdom and knowledge – that is your riches here on earth.

Do not store up riches for yourselves here on earth, where moths and rust destroy, and robbers break in and steal. Instead, store up riches for yourselves in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy, and robbers cannot break in and steal. For your heart will always be where your riches are. (Luke 12.33-34)

Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” discussed the ways in which our online existence is rewiring our minds, replacing deep thought with information overload, and overruling attentiveness with a steady stream of interruptions and distractions. This saturation of technology, he says, is affecting us at the cellular level and turning us into what one researcher terms “suckers for irrelevancy.” Here is the video.

Are we becoming more geeky and less intellectual? I don’t think there is an “absolute” answer to this question, as the “truth” lies with both sides of the coin: That we are living with an ecology where distributed knowledge and information is ubiquitous, and that we are trying to define epistemology based on a world view.

In this Is wikipedia anti-intellectual? by Daniel, he puts forward his views on intellectualism. “We should help each other to become critical thinkers” Totally agreed. Our formal education is still aligned more with the adoption of authority based or canonical knowledge, which may be well designed for “transmission” of factual and procedural knowledge and scientific information. However, the complexity of information landscape (internet, communities, networks, webs, formal institutions) and the abundance of information and “experts” with expert knowledge all over the “spaces” have challenged us to re-think about what it means to be an intellectual, and what makes us a better informed and knowledgeable citizen (or scholar, educator or learner) within a global learning environment.

The Internet and Daily Life

Many Americans use the Internet in everyday activities, but traditional offline habits still dominate

The Internet is registering an initial impact on everyday life in America.

Nearly all Internet users go online to conduct some of their ordinary day-to-day activities, from mundane tasks to social arrangements to personal recreation. Furthermore, online Americans report their Internet use affects the proportions of these affairs in their everyday lives.

People both admire and use the Internet as a tool for conducting their everyday activities.

The vast majority of online Americans hold a high opinion of the Internet as a place to conduct the everyday tasks and pursue the everyday pleasures of life, such as checking the weather, doing their banking, communicating with friends and family, and playing games. Over the course of the four years in which the Pew Internet Project has been tracking online activities, a growing number of users have acted on their positive opinions of the Internet and gone online to do these things.

Throughout this report, we present percentages of “Internet users who do an activity online.” To be clear, we calculated these percentages based on only those Internet users for whom an activity is relevant. That is, we made our calculations based on the percentage of Internet users who undertake that activity somehow in their everyday lives – either offline or online, or both ways. For example, of all Internet users in this study, 53% of them check sport scores somehow in their everyday lives, while 47% of them never check sports scores. Therefore, when we then report that “55% of the Internet users check sports scores online.” we are referring to 55% of that subset of the 53% of Internet users who ever, somehow in their everyday lives, check sports scores.

Thus, we find that in the activities we have used to probe whether people get information for their everyday lives:

Similarly, we find that in the activities we have used to explore everyday interpersonal communication:

At the same time, we find that in the activities we have used to explore commonplace transactions:

Finally, we find that in the activities we have used to explore the ways people entertain themselves in everyday life:

The integration of the Internet into everyday life doesn’t match its popular appeal. Most Internet users still default to the traditional offline ways of communicating, transacting affairs, getting information, and entertaining themselves.

Two different measures suggest that, overall, the virtual world of the Internet still takes second place to the real world as the place to accomplish daily tasks or enjoy recreation. First, among the many Internet users who toggle between the offline and online worlds for activities, most use the “real world” alternative rather than the online alternative. For example, Internet users buy movie tickets more often at the box office than buy them online.

Second, when Internet users do a certain activity exclusively in one realm, more will still do it exclusively offline than exclusively online. For example, among Internet users who ever look for sports scores, almost twice as many will look for them exclusively offline as exclusively online. Of Internet users who ever look up addresses or phone numbers, many more will use phone books than online sources to get this information.

Below are examples showing how Internet users generally prefer the offline world to the online world even when they are comfortable doing things online:

The following percentages of Internet users who do a given activity will do it either exclusively offline or exclusively online:

From among the 18 different everyday activities we measured in this survey, there is a single exception to this pattern of preference for the offline world. Among Internet users who look for maps or driving directions, 56% do it exclusively online and 14% do it exclusively offline. Among the 39% who do it both ways, 48% say they do it more frequently online, and 40% say they do it more frequently offline. Otherwise, the story is that the offline world still is preferred to the online world for many activities related to daily living.

The responses of online Americans suggest that the Internet is a better tool for accomplishing some everyday activities than others. The Internet is most popular when its efficiency comes into play.

The emerging story of the Internet in daily life is the where and how of its use. The nature of our multi-channel world means we can communicate in many ways – by email, phone, letters, face-to-face meetings, and instant messages. And we can gather information from many sources – Web sites, books, newspapers, television, and radio. The pattern of responses in this survey is that people pick one channel or another depending on both the nature of the task and the circumstances of the moment.

Users turn to the Internet most when it offers advantages in speed, convenience, time, and other measures of efficiency. One of the most popular Internet activities, looking for maps and directions, collapses several tasks into one simple, elegant application. Anyone who has used the uncomplicated and effective application for finding driving directions online knows how superior it can be to the often clumsy and time-consuming experience of doing it offline.

Further, given that most Internet users are more mobile than their Internet connections are, a lot of daily activities still depend on where people are. For example, reading a story in the newspaper might be more convenient on the bus to work, while reading that same story online at a desktop computer might fill the need for a break during a busy workday.

Polling of everyday activities shows that the most popular ones share the characteristic of being efficiently done on the Web: getting maps or directions; communicating with others; checking the weather, news and sports scores; buying tickets.

A leading edge of Internet users – 30% of the online population – integrates the Internet into everyday life in a richer and more thorough way.

In past research, the Pew Internet & American Life Project often found a leading edge of Internet users who behave differently from the rest. Demographically, this group is often better educated, of higher income, and has spent more years online than other Internet users. In this report, such a group of users integrates the Internet into everyday life in a much more engaged and richer way than others. It is likely that they are blazing a trail that others will follow.

Different demographic groups of users integrate the Internet into everyday life differently.

Infographic

The tasks of everyday life and the internet

While nearly all Internet users conducted some of their day-to-day activities online in 2004, most still defaulted to the traditional offline ways of communicating, transacting affairs, getting information and entertaining themselves.

The Effects Of The Internet On Society

The Internet, IT, computers and social media are having, an enormous effect on everyone. These computers and the Internet have become one of the most important changes to modern society. They bring transformations to human daily life. This process has changed politics, relationships, news, science, learning, information and entertainment. The Internet has transformed the reality of distances and has made individual self-operating information collection machines that get immediate and easily access to information and communication.

The Internet has turned our existence upside down. It has revolutionised communications, to the extent that it is now our preferred medium of everyday communication.

Now for many people sending emails, ordering a pizza, buying a skirt, sharing a moment with a friend, sending a picture over instant messaging, all is now often done by using the Internet. The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, and with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, although with dissimilar bandwidths, effectiveness and price.

People, companies, and institutions feel the depth of this technological change, but the speed and scope of the transformation has triggered all manner of utopian and dystopian perceptions that, when examined closely through methodologically rigorous empirical research, turn out not to be accurate.

Before the Internet, if you wanted to keep up with the news, you had to go to a shop or news-stand and buy a local edition paper and read what had happened yesterday. However, today a click or two is enough to read your local press and any news source from anywhere in the world, updated up to the minute.

With about 7.7 billion people in this world and with limited use among those under 5 years of age, it’s almost safe to say that the entire humanity is now connected to the internet! There are however variations in the bandwidths available, the efficiency and cost of its use.

While early adopters saw possibilities in using the Internet as a vehicle through which the many challenges facing the world might be addressed, more recently questions have arisen about how Internet technology can be used to spread false and misleading information, and to radicalise and recruit potential terrorists.

There are also concerns as to whether the Internet serves to reduce or exacerbate social divisions; and whether it contributes to the dilution of social norms or, conversely, serves as a channel to perpetuate them.

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.

However, as with all major technological changes, there are positive and negative effects of the internet on the society too.

The Internet’s positive effects include the following:

The Negative Impacts of the Internet on Society include:

New Social Structures and the Culture of Autonomy

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.

Indeed, we live in a new social structure, the global network society, characterised by the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy.

Internet is a technology of freedom, in the terms coined by Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1973, coming from a libertarian culture, paradoxically financed by the Pentagon for the benefit of scientists, engineers, and their students, with no direct military application in mind (Castells 2001).

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

The Internet has opened up options and capacities for individuals to exercise increased autonomy, it also has the potential to change the very ways in which human beings think and analyse data.

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