The internet is defined, by the MIT Technology Review, as the decisive technology of the Information Age. The internet was first created for the means of war, but nowadays human kind is almost entirely connect to technology. At this point everyone who owns a phone will tell you they probably can’t live without them and would have a heart attack if they left or lost it somewhere. There is much debate on the topic whether or not the Internet is good or bad. This, however, is a relative matter that everyone will have their own opinion; young people will tell you that it is good, because it makes things easier and more fun, while older people will tell you that it is ruining the next generation by making them lazier and superficial. Like everything else on this Earth their are two sides to the coin. the Internet brings many good things to the tables, but it also has its dark side and sometimes it’s quite difficult to see the difference.

The good side of the internet is simple: it provides useful information about any topic, social media keeps you up to date on the latest news, it keeps you in touch with family members and/or friends from across the world. Social relations are being constructed on the basis of individual interest and values. With the help of social media, we no longer have to rely on official news sources for updates on current events, because apps like Twitter are replacing those news sources. It helps keep in touch with expanded network at top-level, while making the efforts to engage with closer network face-to-face. Social media like Facebook or Instagram provide a useful way to keep in touch with our friends and family from across the world in an instant. This is similar to what Email can do, which you can send a written text, picture or video to anyone across the world in only seconds and they can respond back in an instant. Google or Bing can provide a useful tool for researching; they can help everyone nowadays find information about any topic in mere seconds. Anyone can start up a business online easily or simply sell their items through Ebay or Amazon to make easy money.  You can buy anything through the Web like cars, books, clothes, pets, etc.

However, like I said earlier, everything that has a good side must also have a dark side and the internet is no exception. We can see the latest news on twitter and other social medias, but that information isn’t necessarily true. It’s becoming extremely difficult to conclude whether a news source is actually trustworthy, because fake news these days make it look like it’s real. There’s also a problem with click-bait, which is when the headline on a news article looks extremely interesting, but the article it self is nothing of what the headline promised. Don’t take everything you see too seriously, because it may look like a trustworthy site, but the information that it contains isn’t true. People may also lie about who they truly are on the internet, this is called cat-fishing, where someone acts like another person to make the victim give them money or sensitive information. This is extremely dangerous, especially if you go and meet the person face-to-face.

More than one billion people on Earth has access to the Internet and the majority of those people are completely addicted; and when I say addicted I mean completely taken over. Those people can’t go a minute without checking their phone and they feel empty and lost without it. Not only that, but human nowadays can’t think on their own and always consult Google to check if their answers are correct; by doing this process we stop thinking for our-self. “The Internet is making us more superficial as thinkers” said Nicholas Carr explaining that we are living inside our phones and not thinking clearly. We have something called “Memory Consolation” which is the ability to transfer new, acquired information from short-term memory to long-term memory, which allows us to become smarter on that specific topic; and that same ability is also helpful for connecting other information to our old information and keep on learning. Nicholas Carr is saying that we are losing that ability, because when we don’t know something we just look it up and and forget about it that same instant. We are so sure that this information will always be on Google so why bother actually learning it? Well, by learning new things is how you make connections through those memories of everything you know.

Attention is key. As long as we are using our phones and electronic moderately and we pay attention and actually learn new things through memory consolation then I think we are going to be fine. The internet was a huge BOOM with society and many don’t agree with it, but whether you like it or not it is the future and we are going to have to learn to live with it. I believe it is a good thing to have everyone learn about the internet and learn how to use it, because it can be quite helpful. It has its good things and bad things, but we just have to learn the difference. It is important to have a good balance between time using our phone and time interacting between other people. It is also important that we learn things without the help of Google and actually read about the topic to deepen our knowledge.