The Online World and Our Everyday Uses of It

‘In recent years it has become commonplace to discuss the Internet as a community – as a virtual place where people meet, chat, conduct business and develop a sense of togetherness.’(Trend, 2001). Almost every person you talk to has a different view of role of the internet and the web in our lives. This is shown in the two readings ‘The emerging online life of a digital native’ by Marc Prensky (2004) and ‘A new world’ by Weinberger (2002). Although, these two views are truthful descriptions of the web, they have slight differences in how positive they believe the uptake of the Web in house holds is. Both are positive views on the web entering our daily lives, although as Weinberger (2002) shows a wary view of the internet saying ‘A new world is opening up, a world that we create as we explore it. Some are inventing it, some are abusing it, and every person browsing and posting is setting bytes in flight that shape this new world.’ Don Tapscott (1998, p.8) has a more positive outlook regarding this, ‘Time on the Net is not passive time, it’s active time. It’s reading time. It’s investigation time. It’s skills development and problem-solving time. It’s time analyzing, evaluating. It’s composing your thoughts time. It’s writing time.’ This argument has some truths for helping the development of our children but it is also truthful for adults. It allows us to keep thinking outside of our squares. If you have a job like landscaping for example, you will have little to do with the computer on a daily basis, however, looking for information about plants or legislation in certain areas on the net is keeping your thought processes active. Just like if it was a child researching a school assignment.

There are many ways to be involved with the net, from email and chat rooms to blogging and creating your own homepage. People also search for products to buy and sell as well as finding information from how to write an essay to finding information to settle a bar quiz disagreement. The web is used by most people in the developed world and many in developing countries. But for different reasons people used the web in different ways. In this essay I have outlined some of the basic uses for the internet that I or my friends use in daily life. These include email, chat rooms, blogging, peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing, as well as buying and selling.

‘Students are not just using technology differently today, but are approaching their life and their daily activities differently because of the technology,’ Prensky (2004). I believe this is not just students but adults as well. Nearly every person I know has an email account but it goes further than that, adults who have moved countries and are keeping in contact with relatives via email, instant messaging as well as through ‘social networking’ sites like facebook or through Web blogs. ‘The technology of the age both expands the variety of human relationships and modifies the form of the older ones. When relationships move from the face-to-face to the electronic mode, they are often altered. Relationshsips that were confined to specific situations like offices or living rooms have become “unglued.” They are no longer geographically confined but can take place anywhere.’ (Ermann et al. 1998, p. 140). Email makes it so easy to keep in touch with people all over the world, a thing that use to be so hard to do, due to cost and time restrictions, I personally find it so much easier with friends living and working all over the world. Prensky (2004) calls email an ‘asynchronous’ form of communication. This is because only one of the communicating parties has to be present, the writer can write the email and send it in their own time and the reader can open it, read it and reply to it in their own time. Of there is another form of communication that Prensky defines which is ‘Synchronous’ this is communication in real time, i.e. the phone is a form of this communication. More and more people are turning to instant messaging on the web, as it is usually cheaper than a long distance phone call. It allows people to write short sentences and send and receive them instantly. So you can in fact have a conversation while on the net. You can even team this with a webcams and you can see each other while you are chatting. It gives you the feeling you are next too each other in stead of far apart. “Whist most people use this technology to keep in touch many young people to use it instead of the talking on the phone, from the privacy of prying parental ears.’ (Prensky, 2004).

Blogs are becoming more common practice with young people and adults alike choosing to add a journal of their lives or interests to the web. Instead of keeping a journal private, you can now create a blog and upload stories, photos and videos, for all to see. This idea of showcasing artwork, music and thoughts is not only for the general public, but for professors and news writers as well. Many of these professional people publish regular blogs which are regularly read by many. Blogs are particularly useful for people that study the Web, as things move so quickly rather than waiting to have their papers published when they will most probably be out of date, they post parts of their work on the blog as to platform the work that they are doing and find other people with the same view. ‘Discussions concerning the results of studies suggesting that people adopt new technology to facilitate and maintain relationships are often framed in a positive light. However, problems may surface from the practice of essentially broadcasting content that has been traditionally defined as personal or private, analogous to content found in a personal diary.’ (Stefanone et al. 2007). Although, at the same time you can create a whole life on your blog and it doesn’t even have to be the real you, Robbins (2000), states that ‘The new technology promises to deliver its user form the constraints and defeats of physical reality and the physical body.’ Starting with a screen name you can create avatar and write your blog around the screen profile. Weinberger (2002) states that ‘it is not unusual on the Web for someone to “try on” a personality and to switch personalities from chat room to chat room; behaviour that would cause your family to plot an intervention off the Web is the norm on the Web.’ I have never encountered this as I don’t often use chat rooms and the only blogs I read belong to my friends. But I can see how easy this is to do, if you never meet the person at the other end of the blog or chat then who’s to say they are who they say they are.

‘YouTube has become a popular form of social networking.’ (Lange 2007).People are not only uploading snippets from their favourite songs or TV shows, but also videos of themselves living life, everything from somebody’s wedding dance to clips from road trips. ‘YouTube participants can broaden or limit physical access to their videos and thus create larger or smaller media circuits by using technical features such as limited "friends-only" viewing or strategic tagging. Viewers may locate videos using keywords or "tags" that video makers designate for their videos or write into the video's title or description.’ (Lange, 2007). This allows uploaders to keep their videos private for friends and family or open for all YouTube visitors to see. This idea of exchanging data is quite strong on the Web, ‘young people increasingly see things available to them online as “free” of ownership and cost. Although legislation and some widely publicised prosecutions have slowed this sharing down some what in the United, I predict this is just temporary,’ Prensky (2004). Most data shows a continual increase of P2P activity. P2P applications are still the most downloaded on the Internet. ‘Young people exchange music and other data as an expression of who they are’ Prensky (2004). Because regular copyright does not allow the download and the use of material, the creative commons was introduced. ‘If a person chooses to license their work under a CC attribution license, for example, they retain there copyright but allows others to use there work without permission and without payment, as long as they credit them for the original creation.’ (Kim, 2007). According to Kim (2007), the use of creative commons is growing in popularity, because as they observed that contemporary copyright law has become so restrictive that it risks impeding future innovation and creativity. Although I had never uploaded anything to YouTube or needed to use creative commons, I think these are a great way to support the creative commons.

‘Search is now the second the biggest use of the Internet, after email’ (Prensky, 2004). Many people use the internet to search for holidays, addresses, phone numbers, or just information for a subject they are interested in. People that use the net frequently will use many different search engines and be looking for more in depth information. However, those that are tentative about what they are searching for will tend to use Google, Msn search or yahoo the most famous and user friendly search engines. This is due to the Information processing and decision theory that Wirth (2007) suggests that, ‘in complex decision situations such as information retrieval on the Web, people tend to favor simplified decision strategies.’ Any search engine can be pulling together a listings page for me based on my interest in e.g. “a cruise holiday,” while at the same time building pages for thousands of others who have other, unpredictable interests, this is because as Weinberger (2002) states the geography of the web is as transient as human interest.

People are also buying and selling products on the web. Sites like amazon.com and eBay are making it easier to easier to find certain products you are looking for. “Real-world time is a series of ticks to which schedules are tied. My time with eBay was different auctions, placed a bid, and checked back every few hours to see if I had been out bid, I felt as if I was returning to a story that was in progress, waiting for me whenever I wanted” (Weinberger, 2002). Amazon and eBay work with the same concept as a search engine, except they only search for information of things for sale on their site rather than the entire Web, but searching for the items you wish to purchase is just as easy as searching for anything else on the net.

‘The Web is woven of hundreds of millions of threads. And, in every case, we get to determine when and how long we will participate, based solely on what suits us. Time like that can spoil you in the real world’ (Weinberger, 2002). Email has become a major part of peoples lives allowing them to keep in contact with people all over the world with relative ease. Many people are also taking up social networking as well as creating web blogs, in order to inform others of their ideas and interests. Blogs are also a great way for scholars to upload abstracts of their papers and study concepts, so they can get feed back and added information from other academics researching the same topics, as well as encouraging people to be creative and innovative. Searching for information and buying and selling items has allowed people to conduct business and shop with added ease, allowing you to get things done quickly so you have more time to spend with friends and family. All of these factors show that the Web is becoming a large part of our lives in a positive way.

Bibliography

- Ermann, M.D., Williams, M.B., Shauf, M.S. (1997). Computers, Ethics and Society, 3rd Edn, Oxford University Press, New York.

- Kim, M. (2007). The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital era: Use of Creative Commons licenses. [Downloaded from Journal of Computer-Mediated communication, 13(1), article 10. http://jcmj.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/kin.html - Last Accessed: 06/12/2007]

- Lange, P.G. (2007). Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube. [Downloaded from Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 18. http://jcmc.indiana.edu./vol13/issue1/lange.html - Last Accessed: 06/12/2007]

- Prensky, M. (2004). The Emerging Online Life of the Digital Native. [Downloaded from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/ - Last Accessed: 30/11/2007]

- Robbins, K. (2000). Cyberspace and the world We Live In. Bell, David & Kennedy, Barbara M (ed.). The Cybercultures Reader (pp. 77-96), Routledge, London.

- Stefanone, M.A, & Jang, C.Y. (2007). Writing for friends and family: The Interpersonal Nature of Blogs. [Downloaded from Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 7. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/stefanone.html - Last Accessed: 06/12/2007]

- Tapscott, D. (1998). Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, McGraw-Hill, New York.

- Trend, D. (2001). Welcome to CyberSchool: Education at the Crossroads in the Information Age, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc, Maryland.

- Weinberger, D. (2002). ‘A New World’ IN Small Pieces Loosely Joined: a Unified Theory of the Web. [Downloaded from: http://www.smallpieces.com/content/chapter1.html - Last accessed: 30/11/2007]

- Wirth, W., Böcking, T., Karnowski, V., and Von Pape, T., (2007). Heuristic and Systematic use of Search Engines. [Downloaded from Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 2. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/wirth/html - Last Accessed: 06/12/2007]