The
Internet (or
internet) is a global system of interconnected
computer networks that use the standard
Internet protocol suite (
TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a
network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked
hypertext documents of the
World Wide Web (WWW) and the
infrastructure to support email.
The origins of the Internet reach back to research of the 1960s, commissioned by the
United States government to build robust, fault-tolerant, and distributed computer networks. The funding of a new U.S.
backbone by the
National Science Foundation in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial backbones, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. The
commercialization of what was by the 1990s an international network resulted in its popularization and incorporation into virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of June 2012, more than 2.4 billion people—nearly a third of the
world's human population—have used the services of the Internet.
[1]
Terminology
Internet is a short form of the technical term
internetwork,
[2] the result of interconnecting computer networks with special gateways or routers. Historically the word has been used, uncapitalized, as a verb and adjective since 1883 to refer to interconnected motions. It was also used from 1974 before
the Internet, uncapitalized, as a verb meaning to connect together, especially for networks.
[3] The Internet is also often referred to as
the Net.
The
Internet, referring to the specific entire global system of IP networks, is a
proper noun and written with an initial
capital letter. In the media and common use it is often not capitalized: "the internet". Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized as a noun but not capitalized as an adjective.
[4]
The terms
Internet and
World Wide Web are often used interchangeably in everyday speech; it is common to speak of going on the Internet when invoking a
browser to view Web pages. However, the Internet is a particular global computer network connecting millions of computing devices; the
World Wide Web is just one of many
services running on the Internet. The Web is a collection of interconnected documents (
Web pages) and other
resources, linked by
hyperlinks and
URLs.
[5] In addition to the Web, a multitude of other services are implemented over the Internet, including
e-mail, file transfer,
remote computer control,
newsgroups, and
online games. Web (and other) services can be implemented on any intranet, accessible to network users.
History
T3 NSFNET Backbone, c. 1992
In December 1974,
RFC 675 – Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program, by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, used the term
internet, as a shorthand for
internetworking; later
RFCs repeat this use, so the word started out as an
adjective rather than the
noun it is today.
[16] Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the
National Science Foundation (NSF) developed the
Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the
Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized and the concept of a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks called the Internet was introduced.
TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation Network (
NSFNET) provided access to
supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations, first at 56 kbit/s and later at 1.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s.
[17] Commercial
internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. The Internet was commercialized in 1995 when NSFNET was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.
[18] The Internet started a rapid expansion to Europe and Australia in the mid to late 1980s
[19][20] and to Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
[21]
Since the mid-1990s the Internet has had a tremendous impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near instant communication by email,
instant messaging,
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) "phone calls",
two-way interactive video calls, and the
World Wide Web[22] with its
discussion forums, blogs,
social networking, and
online shopping sites. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and
social networking.
[23]
During the late 1990s, it was estimated that traffic on the public Internet grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%.
[24] This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary open nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network.
[25] As of 31 March 2011, the estimated total number of
Internet users was 2.095 billion (30.2% of world population).
[26] It is estimated that in 1993 the Internet carried only 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunication, by 2000 this figure had grown to 51%, and by 2007 more than 97% of all telecommunicated information was carried over the Internet.
[27]
Technology
Protocols
As the user data is processed down through the protocol stack, each layer adds an encapsulation at the sending host. Data is transmitted "over the wire" at the link level, left to right. The encapsulation stack procedure is reversed by the receiving host. Intermediate relays remove and add a new link encapsulation for retransmission, and inspect the IP layer for routing purposes.
The communications infrastructure of the Internet consists of its hardware components and a system of software layers that control various aspects of the architecture. While the hardware can often be used to support other software systems, it is the design and the rigorous standardization process of the software architecture that characterizes the Internet and provides the foundation for its scalability and success. The responsibility for the architectural design of the Internet software systems has been delegated to the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
[28] The IETF conducts standard-setting work groups, open to any individual, about the various aspects of Internet architecture. Resulting discussions and final standards are published in a series of publications, each called a
Request for Comments (RFC), freely available on the IETF web site. The principal methods of networking that enable the Internet are contained in specially designated RFCs that constitute the
Internet Standards. Other less rigorous documents are simply informative, experimental, or historical, or document the best current practices (BCP) when implementing Internet technologies.
The Internet standards describe a framework known as the
Internet protocol suite. This is a model architecture that divides methods into a layered system of protocols (
RFC 1122,
RFC 1123). The layers correspond to the environment or scope in which their services operate. At the top is the
application layer, the space for the application-specific networking methods used in software applications, e.g., a web browser program. Below this top layer, the
transport layer connects applications on
different hostsvia the network (e.g.,
client–server model) with appropriate data exchange methods. Underlying these layers are the core networking technologies, consisting of two layers. The
internet layer enables computers to identify and locate each other via
Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and allows them to connect to one another via intermediate (transit) networks. Last, at the bottom of the architecture, is a software layer, the
link layer, that provides connectivity between hosts on the same local network link, such as a local area network (
LAN) or a
dial-up connection. The model, also known as
TCP/IP, is designed to be independent of the underlying hardware, which the model therefore does not concern itself with in any detail. Other models have been developed, such as the
Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, but they are not compatible in the details of description or implementation; many similarities exist and the TCP/IP protocols are usually included in the discussion of OSI networking.
The most prominent component of the Internet model is the Internet Protocol (IP), which provides addressing systems (
IP addresses) for computers on the Internet. IP enables internetworking and in essence establishes the Internet itself. IP Version 4 (
IPv4) is the initial version used on the first generation of today's Internet and is still in dominant use. It was designed to address up to ~4.3 billion (10
9) Internet hosts. However, the explosive growth of the Internet has led to
IPv4 address exhaustion, which entered its final stage in 2011,
[29] when the global address allocation pool was exhausted. A new protocol version, IPv6, was developed in the mid-1990s, which provides vastly larger addressing capabilities and more efficient routing of Internet traffic.
IPv6 is currently in growing
deployment around the world, since Internet address registries (
RIRs) began to urge all resource managers to plan rapid adoption and conversion.
[30]
IPv6 is not interoperable with IPv4. In essence, it establishes a parallel version of the Internet not directly accessible with IPv4 software. This means software upgrades or translator facilities are necessary for networking devices that need to communicate on both networks. Most modern computer operating systems already support both versions of the Internet Protocol. Network infrastructures, however, are still lagging in this development. Aside from the complex array of physical connections that make up its infrastructure, the Internet is facilitated by bi- or multi-lateral commercial contracts (e.g.,
peering agreements), and by technical specifications or protocols that describe how to exchange data over the network. Indeed, the Internet is defined by its interconnections and routing policies.
Routing
Internet packet routing is accomplished among various tiers of Internet Service Providers.
Internet Service Providers connect customers (thought of at the "bottom" of the routing hierarchy) to customers of other ISPs. At the "top" of the routing hierarchy are ten or so
Tier 1 networks, large telecommunication companies which exchange traffic directly "across" to all other Tier 1 networks via unpaid
peering agreements.
Tier 2 networks buy
Internet transit from other ISP to reach at least some parties on the global Internet, though they may also engage in unpaid peering (especially for local partners of a similar size). ISPs can use a single "upstream" provider for connectivity, or use
multihoming to provide protection from problems with individual links.
Internet exchange points create physical connections between multiple ISPs, often hosted in buildings owned by independent third parties.
[citation needed]
Academic institutions, large companies, governments, and other organizations can perform the same role as ISPs, engaging in peering and purchasing transit on behalf of their internal networks of individual computers. Research networks tend to interconnect into large subnetworks such as
GEANT,
GLORIAD,
Internet2, and the UK's
national research and education network,
JANET. These in turn are built around smaller networks.
[citation needed]
General structure
The Internet structure and its usage characteristics have been studied extensively. It has been determined that both the Internet IP routing structure and hypertext links of the World Wide Web are examples of
scale-free networks.
[31]
Many computer scientists describe the Internet as a "prime example of a large-scale, highly engineered, yet highly complex system".
[32] The Internet is heterogeneous; for instance,
data transfer rates and physical characteristics of connections vary widely. The Internet exhibits "
emergent phenomena" that depend on its large-scale organization. For example, data transfer rates exhibit temporal
self-similarity. The principles of the routing and addressing methods for traffic in the Internet reach back to their origins in the 1960s when the eventual scale and popularity of the network could not be anticipated. Thus, the possibility of developing alternative structures is investigated.
[33] The Internet structure was found to be highly robust
[34] to random failures and very vulnerable to high degree attacks.
[35]
Governance
The Internet is a
globally distributed network comprising many voluntarily interconnected autonomous networks. It operates without a central governing body. However, to maintain interoperability, all technical and policy aspects of the underlying core infrastructure and the principal
name spaces are administered by the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), headquartered in
Marina del Rey, California. ICANN is the authority that coordinates the assignment of unique identifiers for use on the Internet, including
domain names, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, application port numbers in the transport protocols, and many other parameters. Globally unified name spaces, in which names and numbers are uniquely assigned, are essential for the global reach of the Internet. ICANN is governed by an international board of directors drawn from across the Internet technical, business, academic, and other non-commercial communities. The government of the United States continues to have the primary role in approving changes to the
DNS root zone that lies at the heart of the domain name system.
[36] ICANN's role in coordinating the assignment of unique identifiers distinguishes it as perhaps the only central coordinating body on the global Internet. On 16 November 2005, the
World Summit on the Information Society, held in
Tunis, established the
Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to discuss Internet-related issues.
Modern uses
The Internet allows greater flexibility in working hours and location, especially with the spread of unmetered high-speed connections. The Internet can be accessed almost anywhere by numerous means, including through
mobile Internet devices. Mobile phones,
datacards,
handheld game consoles and
cellular routers allow users to connect to the Internet
wirelessly. Within the limitations imposed by small screens and other limited facilities of such pocket-sized devices, the services of the Internet, including email and the web, may be available. Service providers may restrict the services offered and mobile data charges may be significantly higher than other access methods.
Educational material at all levels from pre-school to post-doctoral is available from websites. Examples range from
CBeebies, through school and high-school revision guides and
virtual universities, to access to top-end scholarly literature through the likes of
Google Scholar. For
distance education, help with
homework and other assignments, self-guided learning, whiling away spare time, or just looking up more detail on an interesting fact, it has never been easier for people to access educational information at any level from anywhere. The Internet in general and the
World Wide Web in particular are important enablers of both
formal and
informal education.
The low cost and nearly instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge, and skills has made
collaborative work dramatically easier, with the help of
collaborative software. Not only can a group cheaply communicate and share ideas but the wide reach of the Internet allows such groups more easily to form. An example of this is the
free software movement, which has produced, among other things,
Linux,
Mozilla Firefox, and
OpenOffice.org. Internet chat, whether using an
IRC chat room, an
instant messaging system, or a
social networking website, allows colleagues to stay in touch in a very convenient way while working at their computers during the day. Messages can be exchanged even more quickly and conveniently than via email. These systems may allow files to be exchanged, drawings and images to be shared, or voice and video contact between team members.
Content management systems allow collaborating teams to work on shared sets of documents simultaneously without accidentally destroying each other's work. Business and project teams can share calendars as well as documents and other information. Such collaboration occurs in a wide variety of areas including scientific research, software development, conference planning, political activism and creative writing. Social and political collaboration is also becoming more widespread as both Internet access and
computer literacy spread.
The Internet allows computer users to remotely access other computers and information stores easily, wherever they may be. They may do this with or without
computer security, i.e. authentication and encryption technologies, depending on the requirements. This is encouraging new ways of working from home, collaboration and information sharing in many industries. An accountant sitting at home can
audit the books of a company based in another country, on a
server situated in a third country that is remotely maintained by IT specialists in a fourth. These accounts could have been created by home-working bookkeepers, in other remote locations, based on information emailed to them from offices all over the world. Some of these things were possible before the widespread use of the Internet, but the cost of private
leased lines would have made many of them infeasible in practice. An office worker away from their desk, perhaps on the other side of the world on a business trip or a holiday, can access their emails, access their data using
cloud computing, or open a
remote desktop session into their office PC using a secure
Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection on the Internet. This can give the worker complete access to all of their normal files and data, including email and other applications, while away from the office. It has been referred to among
system administrators as the Virtual Private Nightmare,
[37] because it extends the secure perimeter of a corporate network into remote locations and its employees' homes.
Services
World Wide Web
Many people use the terms
Internet and
World Wide Web, or just the
Web, interchangeably, but the two terms are not
synonymous. The
World Wide Web is a global set of
documents,
images and other resources, logically interrelated by
hyperlinks and referenced with
Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). URIs symbolically identify services,
servers, and other databases, and the documents and resources that they can provide.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the main access protocol of the World Wide Web, but it is only one of the hundreds of communication protocols used on the Internet.
Web services also use HTTP to allow software systems to communicate in order to share and exchange business logic and data.
World Wide Web browser software, such as Microsoft's
Internet Explorer,
Mozilla Firefox,
Opera,
Apple's
Safari, and
Google Chrome, lets users navigate from one web page to another via hyperlinks embedded in the documents. These documents may also contain any combination of
computer data, including graphics, sounds,
text,
video,
multimedia and interactive content that runs while the user is interacting with the page.
Client-side software can include animations,
games,
office applications and scientific demonstrations. Through
keyword-driven
Internet research using
search engines like
Yahoo! and
Google, users worldwide have easy, instant access to a vast and diverse amount of online information. Compared to printed media, books, encyclopedias and traditional libraries, the World Wide Web has enabled the decentralization of information on a large scale.
The Web has also enabled individuals and organizations to
publish ideas and information to a potentially large
audience online at greatly reduced expense and time delay. Publishing a web page, a blog, or building a website involves little initial
cost and many cost-free services are available. Publishing and maintaining large, professional web sites with attractive, diverse and up-to-date information is still a difficult and expensive proposition, however. Many individuals and some companies and groups use
web logs or blogs, which are largely used as easily updatable online diaries. Some commercial organizations encourage
staff to communicate advice in their areas of specialization in the hope that visitors will be impressed by the expert knowledge and free information, and be attracted to the corporation as a result. One example of this practice is
Microsoft, whose
product developers publish their personal blogs in order to pique the public's interest in their work. Collections of personal web pages published by large service providers remain popular, and have become increasingly sophisticated. Whereas operations such as
Angelfire and
GeoCities have existed since the early days of the Web, newer offerings from, for example, Facebook and Twitter currently have large followings. These operations often brand themselves as
social network services rather than simply as web page hosts.
Advertising on popular web pages can be lucrative, and
e-commerce or the sale of products and services directly via the Web continues to grow.
When the Web began in the 1990s, a typical web page was stored in completed form on a web server, formatted in
HTML, ready to be sent to a user's browser in response to a request. Over time, the process of creating and serving web pages has become more automated and more dynamic. Websites are often created using
content management or
wiki software with, initially, very little content. Contributors to these systems, who may be paid staff, members of a club or other organization or members of the public, fill underlying databases with content using editing pages designed for that purpose, while casual visitors view and read this content in its final HTML form. There may or may not be editorial, approval and security systems built into the process of taking newly entered content and making it available to the target visitors.
Communication
Email is an important communications service available on the Internet. The concept of sending electronic text messages between parties in a way analogous to mailing letters or memos predates the creation of the Internet. Pictures, documents and other files are sent as
email attachments. Emails can be
cc-ed to multiple
email addresses.
Internet telephony is another common communications service made possible by the creation of the Internet.
VoIP stands for Voice-over-
Internet Protocol, referring to the protocol that underlies all Internet communication. The idea began in the early 1990s with
walkie-talkie-like voice applications for personal computers. In recent years many VoIP systems have become as easy to use and as convenient as a normal telephone. The benefit is that, as the Internet carries the voice traffic, VoIP can be free or cost much less than a traditional telephone call, especially over long distances and especially for those with always-on Internet connections such as
cable or
ADSL. VoIP is maturing into a competitive alternative to traditional telephone service. Interoperability between different providers has improved and the ability to call or receive a call from a traditional telephone is available. Simple, inexpensive VoIP network adapters are available that eliminate the need for a personal computer.
Voice quality can still vary from call to call, but is often equal to and can even exceed that of traditional calls. Remaining problems for VoIP include
emergency telephone number dialing and reliability. Currently, a few VoIP providers provide an emergency service, but it is not universally available. Traditional phones are line-powered and operate during a power failure; VoIP does not do so without a
backup power source for the phone equipment and the Internet access devices. VoIP has also become increasingly popular for gaming applications, as a form of communication between players. Popular VoIP clients for gaming include
Ventrilo and
Teamspeak.
Wii,
PlayStation 3, and
Xbox 360 also offer VoIP chat features.
Data transfer
File sharing is an example of transferring large amounts of data across the Internet. A
computer file can be emailed to customers, colleagues and friends as an attachment. It can be uploaded to a website or
FTP server for easy download by others. It can be put into a "shared location" or onto a
file server for instant use by colleagues. The load of bulk downloads to many users can be eased by the use of "
mirror" servers or
peer-to-peer networks. In any of these cases, access to the file may be controlled by user
authentication, the transit of the file over the Internet may be obscured by
encryption, and money may change hands for access to the file. The price can be paid by the remote charging of funds from, for example, a credit card whose details are also passed – usually fully encrypted – across the Internet. The origin and authenticity of the file received may be checked by
digital signatures or by
MD5 or other message digests. These simple features of the Internet, over a worldwide basis, are changing the production, sale, and distribution of anything that can be reduced to a computer file for transmission. This includes all manner of print publications, software products, news, music, film, video, photography, graphics and the other arts. This in turn has caused seismic shifts in each of the existing industries that previously controlled the production and distribution of these products.
Streaming media is the real-time delivery of digital media for the immediate consumption or enjoyment by end users. Many radio and television broadcasters provide Internet feeds of their live audio and video productions. They may also allow time-shift viewing or listening such as Preview, Classic Clips and Listen Again features. These providers have been joined by a range of pure Internet "broadcasters" who never had on-air licenses. This means that an Internet-connected device, such as a computer or something more specific, can be used to access on-line media in much the same way as was previously possible only with a television or radio receiver. The range of available types of content is much wider, from specialized technical
webcasts to on-demand popular multimedia services.
Podcasting is a variation on this theme, where – usually audio – material is downloaded and played back on a computer or shifted to a
portable media player to be listened to on the move. These techniques using simple equipment allow anybody, with little censorship or licensing control, to broadcast audio-visual material worldwide.
Digital media streaming increases the demand for network bandwidth. For example, standard image quality needs 1 Mbit/s link speed for SD 480p, HD 720p quality requires 2.5 Mbit/s, and the top-of-the-line HDX quality needs 4.5 Mbit/s for 1080p.
[38]
Webcams are a low-cost extension of this phenomenon. While some webcams can give full-frame-rate video, the picture either is usually small or updates slowly. Internet users can watch animals around an African waterhole, ships in the
Panama Canal, traffic at a local roundabout or monitor their own premises, live and in real time. Video
chat rooms and
video conferencing are also popular with many uses being found for personal webcams, with and without two-way sound. YouTube was founded on 15 February 2005 and is now the leading website for free streaming video with a vast number of users. It uses a
flash-based web player to stream and show video files. Registered users may upload an unlimited amount of video and build their own personal profile. YouTube claims that its users watch hundreds of millions, and upload hundreds of thousands of videos daily.
[39]
Access
Common methods of
Internet access in homes include dial-up, landline
broadband (over
coaxial cable,
fiber optic or copper wires),
Wi-Fi,
satellite and
3G/
4G technology
cell phones. Public places to use the Internet include libraries and
Internet cafes, where computers with Internet connections are available. There are also
Internet access points in many public places such as airport halls and coffee shops, in some cases just for brief use while standing. Various terms are used, such as "public Internet kiosk", "public access terminal", and "Web
payphone". Many hotels now also have public terminals, though these are usually fee-based. These terminals are widely accessed for various usage like ticket booking, bank deposit, online payment etc. Wi-Fi provides wireless access to computer networks, and therefore can do so to the Internet itself.
Hotspots providing such access include
Wi-Fi cafes, where would-be users need to bring their own wireless-enabled devices such as a laptop or
PDA. These services may be free to all, free to customers only, or fee-based. A hotspot need not be limited to a confined location. A whole campus or park, or even an entire city can be enabled.
Grassroots efforts have led to
wireless community networks. Commercial Wi-Fi services covering large city areas are in place in London,
Vienna,
Toronto, San Francisco,
Philadelphia, Chicago and
Pittsburgh. The Internet can then be accessed from such places as a park bench.
[40] Apart from Wi-Fi, there have been experiments with proprietary mobile wireless networks like
Ricochet, various high-speed data services over cellular phone networks, and fixed wireless services. High-end mobile phones such as
smartphones in general come with Internet access through the phone network. Web browsers such as
Opera are available on these advanced handsets, which can also run a wide variety of other Internet software. More mobile phones have Internet access than PCs, though this is not as widely used.
[41] An Internet access provider and protocol matrix differentiates the methods used to get online.
An Internet blackout or outage can be caused by local signaling interruptions. Disruptions of
submarine communications cables may cause blackouts or slowdowns to large areas, such as in the
2008 submarine cable disruption. Less-developed countries are more vulnerable due to a small number of high-capacity links. Land cables are also vulnerable, as in 2011 when a woman digging for scrap metal severed most connectivity for the nation of Armenia.
[42] Internet blackouts affecting almost entire countries can be achieved by governments as a form of
Internet censorship, as in the blockage of the
Internet in Egypt, whereby approximately 93%
[43] of networks were without access in 2011 in an attempt to stop mobilization for
anti-government protests.
[44]
Users
Internet users per 100 inhabitants Source: ITU[45]
Overall Internet usage has seen tremendous growth. From 2000 to 2009, the number of Internet users globally rose from 394 million to 1.858 billion.
[48] By 2010, 22 percent of the world's population had access to computers with 1 billion
Google searches every day, 300 million Internet users reading blogs, and 2 billion videos viewed daily on YouTube.
[49]
After English (27%), the most requested languages on the
World Wide Web are Chinese (23%), Spanish (8%), Japanese (5%), Portuguese and German (4% each), Arabic, French and Russian (3% each), and Korean (2%).
[50] By region, 42% of the world's
Internet users are based in Asia, 24% in Europe, 14% in North America, 10% in Latin America and the
Caribbean taken together, 6% in Africa, 3% in the Middle East and 1% in Australia/Oceania.
[51] The Internet's technologies have developed enough in recent years, especially in the use of
Unicode, that good facilities are available for development and communication in the world's widely used languages. However, some glitches such as
mojibake (incorrect display of some languages' characters) still remain.
In an American study in 2005, the percentage of men using the Internet was very slightly ahead of the percentage of women, although this difference reversed in those under 30. Men logged on more often, spent more time online, and were more likely to be broadband users, whereas women tended to make more use of opportunities to communicate (such as email). Men were more likely to use the Internet to pay bills, participate in auctions, and for recreation such as downloading music and videos. Men and women were equally likely to use the Internet for shopping and banking.
[52]More recent studies indicate that in 2008, women significantly outnumbered men on most social networking sites, such as Facebook and Myspace, although the ratios varied with age.
[53] In addition, women watched more streaming content, whereas men downloaded more.
[54] In terms of blogs, men were more likely to blog in the first place; among those who blog, men were more likely to have a professional blog, whereas women were more likely to have a personal blog.
[55]
Social impact
The Internet has enabled entirely new forms of social interaction, activities, and organizing, thanks to its basic features such as widespread usability and access. In the first decade of the 21st century, the first generation is raised with widespread availability of Internet connectivity, bringing consequences and concerns in areas such as personal privacy and identity, and distribution of copyrighted materials. These "
digital natives" face a variety of challenges that were not present for prior generations.
Social networking and entertainment
Many people use the World Wide Web to access news, weather and sports reports, to plan and book vacations and to find out more about their interests. People use
chat, messaging and email to make and stay in touch with friends worldwide, sometimes in the same way as some previously had
pen pals. The Internet has seen a growing number of
Web desktops, where users can access their files and settings via the Internet.
Social networking websites such as
Facebook,
Twitter, and
MySpace have created new ways to socialize and interact. Users of these sites are able to add a wide variety of information to pages, to pursue common interests, and to connect with others. It is also possible to find existing acquaintances, to allow communication among existing groups of people. Sites like
LinkedIn foster commercial and business connections. YouTube and
Flickr specialize in users' videos and photographs.
The Internet has been a major outlet for leisure activity since its inception, with entertaining social experiments such as
MUDs and
MOOs being conducted on university servers, and humor-related
Usenet groups receiving much traffic. Today, many
Internet forumshave sections devoted to games and funny videos; short cartoons in the form of
Flash movies are also popular. Over 6 million people use blogs or message boards as a means of communication and for the sharing of ideas. The
internet pornography and
online gamblingindustries have taken advantage of the World Wide Web, and often provide a significant source of advertising revenue for other websites.
[56] Although many governments have attempted to restrict both industries' use of the Internet, in general this has failed to stop their widespread popularity.
[57]
Another area of leisure activity on the Internet is
multiplayer gaming.
[58] This form of recreation creates communities, where people of all ages and origins enjoy the fast-paced world of multiplayer games. These range from
MMORPG to
first-person shooters, from
role-playing video games to
online gambling. While online gaming has been around since the 1970s, modern modes of online gaming began with subscription services such as
GameSpy and
MPlayer.
[59] Non-subscribers were limited to certain types of game play or certain games. Many people use the Internet to access and download music, movies and other works for their enjoyment and relaxation. Free and fee-based services exist for all of these activities, using centralized servers and distributed peer-to-peer technologies. Some of these sources exercise more care with respect to the original artists' copyrights than others.
Internet usage has been correlated to users' loneliness.
[60] Lonely people tend to use the Internet as an outlet for their feelings and to share their stories with others, such as in the "
I am lonely will anyone speak to me" thread.
Cybersectarianism is a new organizational form which involves: "highly dispersed small groups of practitioners that may remain largely anonymous within the larger social context and operate in relative secrecy, while still linked remotely to a larger network of believers who share a set of practices and texts, and often a common devotion to a particular leader. Overseas supporters provide funding and support; domestic practitioners distribute tracts, participate in acts of resistance, and share information on the internal situation with outsiders. Collectively, members and practitioners of such sects construct viable virtual communities of faith, exchanging personal testimonies and engaging in collective study via email, on-line chat rooms and web-based message boards."
[61]
Cyberslacking can become a drain on corporate resources; the average UK employee spent 57 minutes a day surfing the Web while at work, according to a 2003 study by Peninsula Business Services.
[62] Internet addiction disorder is excessive computer use that interferes with daily life. Psychologist Nicolas Carr believe that Internet use has other
effects on individuals, for instance improving skills of scan-reading and interfering with the deep thinking that leads to true creativity.
[63]
Electronic business
Electronic business (E-business) involves business processes spanning the entire
value chain: electronic purchasing and
supply chain management, processing orders electronically, handling customer service, and cooperating with business partners.
E-commerce seeks to add revenue streams using the Internet to build and enhance relationships with clients and partners.
According to research firm
IDC, the size of total worldwide e-commerce, when global business-to-business and -consumer transactions are added together, will equate to $16 trillion in 2013.
[64] IDate, another research firm, estimates the global market for digital products and services at $4.4 trillion in 2013.
[65] A report by
Oxford Economics adds those two together to estimate the total size of the
digital economy at $20.4 trillion, equivalent to roughly 13.8% of global sales.
[66]
Telecommuting
Main article:
Telecommuting
Remote work is facilitated by tools such as
groupware,
virtual private networks,
conference calling,
videoconferencing, and
Voice over IP(VOIP). It can be efficient and useful for companies as it allows workers to communicate over long distances, saving significant amounts of travel time and cost. As
broadband Internet connections become more commonplace, more and more workers have adequate bandwidth at home to use these tools to link their home to their corporate
intranet and internal phone networks.
Crowdsourcing
Main article:
Crowdsourcing
Internet provides a particularly good venue for crowdsourcing (
outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people) since individuals tend to be more open in web-based projects where they are not being physically judged or scrutinized and thus can feel more comfortable sharing.
Crowdsourcing systems are used to accomplish a variety of tasks. For example, the crowd may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see
human-based computation), or help capture, systematize, or analyze large amounts of data (see also
citizen science).
Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries.
[67] In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on
grant writing,
strategic planning, departmental documentation, and committee work.
[68]The
United States Patent and Trademark Office uses a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding
prior art relevant to examination of pending patent applications.
Queens, New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local park.
[69]
The
English Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the World Wide Web
[70] and ranks in the top 10 among all Web sites in terms of traffic.
[71]
Politics and political revolutions
The Internet has achieved new relevance as a political tool. The presidential campaign of
Howard Dean in 2004 in the United States was notable for its success in soliciting donation via the Internet. Many political groups use the Internet to achieve a new method of organizing in order to carry out their mission, having given rise to
Internet activism, most notably practiced by rebels in the
Arab Spring.
[72][73]
The New York Times suggested that
social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, helped people organize the political revolutions in Egypt where it helped certain classes of protesters organize protests, communicate grievances, and disseminate information.
[74]
The potential of the Internet as a civic tool of communicative power was thoroughly explored by
Simon R. B. Berdal in his thesis of 2004:
As the globally evolving Internet provides ever new access points to virtual discourse forums, it also promotes new civic relations and associations within which communicative power may flow and accumulate. Thus, traditionally ... national-embedded peripheries get entangled into greater, international peripheries, with stronger combined powers... The Internet, as a consequence, changes the topology of the "centre-periphery" model, by stimulating conventional peripheries to interlink into "super-periphery" structures, which enclose and "besiege" several centres at once.[75]
Berdal, therefore, extends the
Habermasian notion of the
Public sphere to the Internet, and underlines the inherent global and civic nature that intervowen Internet technologies provide. To limit the growing civic potential of the Internet, Berdal also notes how "self-protective measures" are put in place by those threatened by it:
If we consider China’s attempts to filter "unsuitable material" from the Internet, most of us would agree that this resembles a self-protective measure by the system against the growing civic potentials of the Internet. Nevertheless, both types represent limitations to "peripheral capacities". Thus, the Chinese government tries to prevent communicative power to build up and unleash (as the
1989 Tiananmen Square uprising suggests, the government may find it wise to install "upstream measures"). Even though limited, the Internet is proving to be an empowering tool also to the Chinese periphery: Analysts believe that Internet petitions have influenced policy implementation in favour of the public’s online-articulated will ...
[75]
Philanthropy
The spread of low-cost internet access in developing countries has opened up new possibilities for
peer-to-peer charities, which allow individuals to contribute small amounts to charitable projects for other individuals. Websites, such as
DonorsChoose and
GlobalGiving, allow small-scale donors to direct funds to individual projects of their choice.
A popular twist on internet-based philanthropy is the use of
peer-to-peer lending for charitable purposes.
Kiva pioneered this concept in 2005, offering the first web-based service to publish individual loan profiles for funding. Kiva raises funds for local intermediary
microfinance organizations which post stories and updates on behalf of the borrowers. Lenders can contribute as little as $25 to loans of their choice, and receive their money back as borrowers repay. Kiva falls short of being a pure peer-to-peer charity, in that loans are disbursed before being funded by lenders and borrowers do not communicate with lenders themselves.
[76][77]
However, the recent spread of low cost Internet access in
developing countries has made genuine international person-to-person philanthropy increasingly feasible. In 2009 the US-based nonprofit
Zidisha tapped into this trend to offer the first person-to-person microfinance platform to link lenders and borrowers across international borders without intermediaries. Members can fund loans for as little as a dollar, which the borrowers then use to develop business activities that improve their families' incomes while repaying loans to the members with interest. Borrowers access the internet via public cybercafes, donated laptops in village schools, and even smart phones, then create their own profile pages through which they share photos and information about themselves and their businesses. As they repay their loans, borrowers continue to share updates and dialogue with lenders via their profile pages. This direct web-based connection allows members themselves to take on many of the communication and recording tasks traditionally performed by local organizations, bypassing geographic barriers and dramatically reducing the cost of microfinance services to the entrepreneurs.
[78]
Censorship
Some governments, such as those of
Burma,
Iran,
North Korea, the
Mainland China,
Saudi Arabia, and the
United Arab Emiratesrestrict what people in their countries can access on the Internet, especially political and religious content. This is accomplished through software that filters domains and content so that they may not be easily accessed or obtained without elaborate circumvention.
[79]
In Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, major Internet service providers have voluntarily, possibly to avoid such an arrangement being turned into law, agreed to restrict access to sites listed by authorities. While this list of forbidden URLs is supposed to contain addresses of only known child pornography sites, the content of the list is secret.
[80] Many countries, including the United States, have enacted laws against the possession or distribution of certain material, such as
child pornography, via the Internet, but do not mandate filtering software. There are many free and commercially available software programs, called
content-control software, with which a user can choose to block offensive websites on individual computers or networks, in order to limit a child's access to pornographic materials or depiction of violence.
source: www.wikipedia.com