minihobbs: The Internet

Here is a little thing I did about the pros and cons of the internet for college. People say it's a bit long but I seem to disagree somehow... The Internet Many people nowadays have acess to the internet at their home, or some other place with internet access. I will be explaining some of the pros and cons of using the internet for whatever reason. There are many things that the internet can be used for. One thing that it is used for is online banking. Some banks let you control your bank account from home, if you have the internet. This way you can keep track of your balance from anywhere that has internet access, instead of going down town to look at your balance. You can also do many other things with your online bank account, such as manage your bills etc. Examples of this are banks like Natwest and HSBC. Although there are many flaws in using online banking. One reason is that people have many ways at looking at your bank information, although it says that it is protected. This leaves your account left open to fraud and many other types of crime. Shopping online is becoming more and more common nowadays. Instead of going to the supermarket, where it is most likely to be busy, you can order your shopping online. You can just pick what you want for your shopping, and in just a few clicks you can have your shopping delivered to your door, without you having to leave the house. You can also order things like a new desk for your computer, and then have it reserved for collection, rather than having it delivered to your door. A common example of this would be sites like Play.com or Ebay. But, like with online banking, sometimes this cannot be safe for your card details to be stored online. Another use of the internet is the use of communications. One type of communication through the internet, and is very common, is e-mail. You can send an email to a friend, colleague, or just someone you know from another country. E-mails can contain many things though. You can send documents to colleagues or school/college, if you have done a piece of work at home. Examples of e-mail accounts are things like Hotmail and Yahoo. But e-mails can be bad for us as well. This is because some companies like to send emails that have no meaning, stuff like advertising, and even worse...attachments. As these attachments can contain viruses that can harm your pc. Another type of commuciation by using the internet is instant messaging. You can have a conversation with anyone from all over the country, or even someone in a different country. The messages you send to them will be instant, and the name of this type of communication kind of gives that point away. Examples of instant messaging are things like MSN and Yahoo. You can get information from the internet through many different ways. One of these ways is through a search engine. The way a search engine works is that you can type in specific subjects, such as "golf", and it will bring up lot's of websites relating to golf. Search engines have websites submitted to them. The search engine then sorts them out to different categories for the search. Examples of search engines would Google, Yahoo, Ask and Lycos. Another way of getting information from using the internet is by using an online encyclopaedia. The encyclopaedia holds lot's of information regarding thousands of different subjects. Then, just like a search engine, you type in what you are looking for (e.g. cognitive learning), it will bring up all the information it has stored on there about cognitive learning. An example of this would be Wikipedia. Although, websites like Wikipedia have bad sides to them. I say this because anyone could edit the information on that particular subject, therefore, making it false information that the user will use for there own intentions. One more use for the internet is sharing information. You can do this in many ways. You can create a blog in which you can create a piece of text on anything, be it an online diary or tutorials for something. An example of a blog host, would be Wordpress, Blogspot and Live Journal. The only bad thing with a blog, is that you have to be careful what you put in it, as it may give too much information away about yourself. Another way of sharing information is through a thing called a website. You can share what you like with a website, as long as it is not illegal. You can do what a blog does with a website. You can post stuff off your site to keep track of daily/weekly/monthly events that happen in your life. Many other things can be shared through a website, like tutorials, ebooks, pictures, information and much more. Although these methods of sharing information can result to sharing bad types of information and media, such as music, television shows and movies. Resulting in illegal downloads. Sharing media over the internet is becoming more and more common these days. You can share all types of media over the internet, be it a song from your favourite album or a picture. The way you can display this media is through different things like a website or blog. Also, you can use search engines to find the different types of media mentioned just now. Nowadays, you can make your own video, save it to your pc, then your can upload it through a website, and that video will be displayed to everyone who is browsing the internet if they are on that page. Pictures have many different uses on the internet. They can be used for blogging profile pictures, showing a diagram, and even stuff that you have created yourself, also showing photographs that have been taken of the land around them. Gaming is becoming more and more popular with children, and some adults alike. Offline gaming may have been around for ages, but online gaming is really popular these days. With the internet combined with gaming, the possiblities are endless. You can play a multi-player battle with your friends, or just random people who have the same agme as you. Now, you can even talk to each other through online gaming. this acts as sort of an in-game chat system, to just chat generally or about the game itself. There are some more bad things I would like to say about communication on the internet, and also sharing information. The problem with this is that yong children these days will put information onto a blog host site (e.g. Bebo, Facebook, Myspace). But young children, mainly in their young teens are putting information about themselves onto the site, for other people to see. Now, as a normal person, you may not notice this. But the information about those children is viewable to everyone. This means that the information is viewable to paedophiles, rapists and those sort of people. This means that if the children put up their address or contact details, some adults can act like they are the same age as some young girls, which means that the girls do not know who it is apart from someone around their age. This can then lead to online stalking, which can have one big horrible ending. Therefore, making blogs and IM an unsafe territory for children to go on. By Matt Hobbs