Internet Interests

Looking at Internet Growth

Six years ago when I decided to become a professional website developer, I remember excitedly calling for my wife to come and look at a television commercial that also listed the advertiser’s website address. It was exciting to see that big companies were now investing in the Internet and that if the trend continued; it wouldn’t be long before having a website was as commonplace as having a telephone number. However, there wasn’t a whole lot of information available on the Internet yet.

Back then, using an Internet Search Engine would yield perhaps as many as a few hundred hits when you tried to look up something. Today, searching for a topic on the Internet can yield literally hundreds of thousands of hits about your chosen topic. What a great way to judge just how much content has been contributed to the Internet over the last few years.

The Internet has grown in many ways and it is even now being used to perform, what some people might call, miracles. Online doctors have been able to save lives in remote regions of the world. Internet collaborations have found previously unknown resources suddenly joining in and making significant contributions to their cause. Ecommerce has revolutionized the way that our global economy works. And email has changed the way that we communicate with each other both personally and professionally.

Internet Researchers comb through the Internet performing research in a few hours that might have taken weeks to gather before the Internet became so rich with useful information. Considering how much information has now come online, and how quickly more information is being added every moment of every day, it quickly becomes very clear that in the next few decades we will probably be able to find the wealth of human knowledge at our fingertips and available on the Internet.

No longer do you need to wait for the evening news shows; nowadays you can jump on the Internet and find instant news updates and more information about each topic than you will ever be able to get from the evening news shows alone. Perhaps the most dramatic difference in getting your information this new way is that you can make up your own mind on how you feel about the news without being influenced by half-truths or sneering news announcers. With the Internet, you can get your news from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of delivery methods including emailed news flashes, streaming video feeds, in-depth articles, pictures, interactive maps, audio feeds, live video feeds, and even more ways are being devised all the time.

If you avidly use the Internet, you have undoubtedly already developed quite a few friendships through the Internet. You’ve probably never met these people face to face or perhaps even over the phone, yet you’ve shared personal information with them and you have come to trust these people. If you never had a pen-pal when you were growing up, take a good look at your emails these days and you will see that you probably have a lot of pen-pals now. If you’re trendy, you may even be communicating by using some form of video feed through the Internet.

Looking back over how much has happened to the Internet in the last few years, it is easy to see why many people are reeling from the culture shock. The recent successes and potential for so many more successes in such a small amount of time is going to take many people a while to become accustomed to. The moral and legal issues of the Internet are still being debated in many forums and the growing power of the Internet seems to be taking everyone by surprise. Some are even questioning whether or not we have created humanity’s first “global brain”. They question its maturity and in what directions it should be driven.

No matter what your Internet philosophy may be, the Internet has definitely had a profound effect on our world and there doesn’t appear to be any way to keep it from continuing to influence our view of the world for many years to come. Security surveillance operations can now be performed remotely and there are many other plans for a wide variety of security controlled situations via the Internet. When these plans are implemented, we will all be living in a much safer world, albeit a little less private.

The next time that you turn to the Internet for an answer, take a moment and reflect upon the wonder of its power because it represents the power of the collective human mind. Our destiny is being shaped and the Internet is the tool.

Respectfully submitted by Steve Duell
SFBA Chapter Webmaster
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