Now We Have the Internet, But Why Do We Need It? 340
ReLik writes "BBC News is reporting on a survey carried out on the statistics of internet users in the UK, 'While the battle for digital access is being won, we now face a struggle to convince everyone the net is worth using' said Professor Richard Rose, of the Oxford Internet Institute. It begs the question why goverments around the world are encouraging everyone to use the internet, but is there really enough of a reason for everybody to need to? Is the internet suitable for everybody? Will it ever be?"
Of Course we need it (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats a ridiculous question to ask the internet (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is on a website asking us why do we need it.
Well for one, news, second research, third communication, forth freedom of speech, fifth entertainment, sixth education.
Depends on the use (Score:4, Insightful)
Some people use the Internet for research, discussion, and news; others use it for warez and porn.
Hey, I could take a screwdriver and deside to poke myself in the eye with it... does that mean we don't need screwdrivers?
silly question (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet is a great tool, and just like other tools it's not neccessary, but it improves the quality of life. Of course it not for everyone.
Technology fighting technology (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason I love slashdot is that even though the editors fuck up every once in a while (don't we all?) someone else is quick to correct it in the comments. Same goes for wikis, usenet and so on. Everyone can chime in.
Sure, it creates a lot of noise, but it's better than the slick, mindkilling flow that comes out of the television.
That governments encourage the use of the net will be their downfall - they can never control it as well as they can control traditional media sources.
Re:Simple (Score:1, Insightful)
Sometimes I wonder why people describe Slashdot as the most intelligent community on the 'net. The majority of users think that the same old porn jokes are still funny in different contexts. I can't read a page here without picturing blathering, drooling morons.
Its more efficient than going to a library (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet is quick, you can learn about anything at the click of a button, you dont have to spend hours at the library looking through books,
Also you can communicate with complete strangers instantly. You get to communicate with guys like me who can tell you how the internet is useful, but I wont cook your dinner.
Good uses I've found (Score:5, Insightful)
Personal research. Never before has it been so easy to find out if it's normal for your testicles to itch periodically. Not just great for sexual stuff either, it really helped me as a teen to understand social norms, and make me feel less abnormal.
Consumer research. I no longer drive to kmart, walmart, target, best buy, circuit city, etc when I want to buy something. I hit their respective websites to price check, feature check, etc.... then go to the store I plan on buying from. Not to mention the benefits of sites like newegg.com.
Communication. Duh. Email is awsome, so long as you can manage the spam. Instant Messaging is awsome. Internet(email/www/IM) to cell phone (sms) is awsome.
Resource sharing. Via the Internet, work and school I have instant access to countless various Unix/Linux computers and windows boxes. Usually I just leave my work up on a VNC server on a unix box and connect to it from wherever.
I can certainly imagine life without the net (and it's nice to try it sometimes)... but for computer use, I definitelly feel naked without it.
Re:Technology fighting technology (Score:3, Insightful)
So not only are people sitting taking stuff in, they're taking a very VERY narrow polished view of the world in, one that simply DOESN'T have alternatives.
The net has tens of thousands of news sites. You can pick your own. You can follow up the history of what's reported on instantly. You can find out the reality all as part of the one medium.
Re:What a dick (Score:1, Insightful)
MatLab gave students versions of their software for $10 with a license that was only good for a year. If Sun had done something like that, I'd probably have used Solaris instead of Slackware and I'd be paying full price for it now.
We need the internet.. (Score:2, Insightful)
To communicate about new standards and protocols that will develop the internet further.
Have you ever thought of the interconnectedness of people in this digital era, while under the influence of some mind altering substance? It's a beautiful thought.
We don't know why we exist, but communcating must, if not be a reason, then at least a mean to finding a reason.
We need it to quickly verify truth (Score:2, Insightful)
The irony is that the Internet was built on the back of Unix, and the internet is what will be SCOs undoing LALL!!
Who needs it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, who needs that?
b2b (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're only looking at web pages, you're missing 75% of the traffic that traverses the Internet today.
I hate these stupid questions (Score:4, Insightful)
For starters I've observed that almost all the people who say those things when they say "internet" actually mean "web", and furthermore are basing all of that on the sites that they have seen or heard about. These people also typically do not read much I've noticed.
Secondly they dont equate email with the Internet.
Its like the people who say that computers are "useless" and "boring" then you point out to them that they use computers every time they pick up a phone or turn on the TV.
To say that one does not need the Internet is the same as saying that one does not need communication.
Re:$$ in my pocket (Score:1, Insightful)
Layoff already, some people are good at design, where I can program some PHP I cant make a webpage look good design wise. being artistic is a talent you know.
What we get (Score:4, Insightful)
That information can be of almost any type or of any form.
Want to read about the mercury space program, or see the latest pictures of nebulae? Go search for it. In the old days you could have headed to the library and look for this stuff, but they would be unlikely to have Hubble photos released this morning.
You think your Aunt Tellie has Diabetes? Go search for the symptoms... and support groups too. In the old days tis was a trip to the library, a local clinic, or you had to wait for a doctor's appointment
Need to find out if someone is selling a 4 barrel carbeurator for your 1974 Chevy Impalla?
If your local shop doesn't have it, Go search on Ebay or another sales site. If not, maybe do a directory search of auto parts stores in the city next door. In the old days, you were SOL until your local shop got the part
Hey, there's a new Rush album and DVD coming out. Cool. Head over to their website and see if there's a clip or some photos.In the old days you were lucky to hear the guy on the radio announce that Rush was releasing a record..or did a week ago
This is all information that can now be obtained in a matter of minutes.
That's what the net gives us, instant information and knowledge.
p/g
A lot depends on PC saturation too... (Score:3, Insightful)
During those few weeks, it struck me how utterly useless the PC was without Net access. I couldn't get security fixes or any other software without actually buying it on CD via mail order or at a store. I couldn't check news, sports, music or computer-related sites whenever I liked and I certainly couldn't e-mail anyone with it (and who sends hand-written letters nowadays?). BTW, if you point out to the average person in the UK that CDs and DVDs cost up to a third less online than they do in UK stores, I'm sure they'd rush to get online :-)
Re:Technology fighting technology (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with this. All the jokes about blog about peoples' boring lives aside, the net lets average people try and publish their ideas. Sure 80% of it's crap, but at least people are doing something.
I love the fact that I can publish a blog and see how people like my writing style. It lets me know without having to write a whole book if I have any talent or not. Try doing that without the net.
The Internet is in it's infancy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine what the Internet could be used for in the future. The Semantic Web [w3.org] or something like it is set to revolutionalize the Internet of the future. Imagine being able to organise and sort information based on the qualaties - instead of quantaties - of the information (See Microsoft's qualatative search [slashdot.org]). The position the Internet is in today is that most of the information contained in it is quantative in nature, it is stored in a manner that reflects machine organization of information. Qualative information on the other hand is much more useful for performing searches and organizing information, it allows the retrieval of information to be based on attributes rather than specific-word-matches. Going back to the Microsoft search link, using qualatative information as the criteria of the search you could search for a base attribute of "cars" and refine the search using arbitrary attributes such as "sleek form", and "red". In this example, a web page that held information about "Ferrari's" would be included in the "car's" search results even if it did not explicitly contain the word "car" as part of it's web page text - in the semantic web XML markup, "car" would be one of it's attributes.
Re:Simple (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thats a ridiculous question to ask the internet (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Thats a ridiculous question to ask the internet (Score:1, Insightful)
Hey, I hate shopping. I prefer to go out and do other things than go to malls and retail outlets.
The Net works for me, because I don't have to waste time going to those concrete jungles and purchase things. Besides, I can more easiliy find what I'm looking for online. Ever go to a book or music store and without the benefit of a shopping list completely forget what you came in to buy?
So, what do I do when I'm not shopping? I play soccer, run, ride my bike, swim laps, dine at restaurants... Okay, I also stay indoors to code... Or go to a local coffeeshop and code...
Re:100% (Score:2, Insightful)
That's why I feel that in the case of the Internet, it has such amazing utility for finding information and facilitating communication that I think it suffers much less from that problem. My dad spent the past 20 years working on high-tech shit, so he obviously didn't have an issue, but my mother-in-law is about as technically oriented as the Amish and even she uses the Internet all of the time, once she gave it a chance.
Campaigns to convince people to use the Internet and studies by bored academecians looking to justify more grant money are all pointless. I'm sure that this same nonsense took place when the telephone first started to become popular. The Internet is such mind-blowing advance in human communication that access isn't going to do anything but improve. So sit back, get a good laugh from all of the hand waving, and then go read some news, IM an old friend, and search around for a great price on that new camera, because you can.
Network of friends (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't really absorb information by reading an srticle; the best learning experiences involve interaction and feedback. This is why teachers still exists, even though most information has been available in books for a long time. The internet provides a way to extend and accelerate your network of friends beyond what would ordinarily be physically possible. In a way, snail-mail could do this, but the process of searching out like-minded individuals and communicating usefully was impractical.
On the internet you can talk with a dozen people who may each have 1/12th of a solution. You can communicate with text, images, and sound. Publishing your solution for others to use is incredibly easy.
It's also a giant retail store, surplus store, garage sale, and swap meet. Just this week I needed a specialized high-voltage supply for an older industrial flat-panel display. There was no way I was going to find one locally. I simply posted my query to the appropriate Usenet group, and in one day I had someone ask me for a photo of the supply, because they might have one in a box in the attic. I already have the power supply and it works. It might have taken me months to find one any other way.
The internet is pretty easy to abuse, and just once I'd like to get my hands on the punk who put out this last email worm. It's probably not possible, but I wish there was a way to find a balance between anonymity and accountability.
These are silly questions, IMHO.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The Internet is, quite simply, an entirely new form of mass communications. Arguments about the "Net being too centered around Americans to be very useful for " are invalid. *Anyone* can publish his/her own web pages once he/she is online! If the Internet currently offers nothing for you, then all you need is enough motivation to *create* some content that IS useful to you.
Perhaps too many of us have gotten used to all the passive forms of mass media (television, newspapers, magazines, radio) where the "end user" sits down and digests whatever the publisher/content creator chooses to feed you?
The Internet makes *everyone* a potential publisher with the ability to reach the entire world at minimal cost (practically free in many cases!). Write fluent Japanese and think there aren't enough sites in Japanese? Make some! Can't find a discussion board covering political issues in Zaire? Maybe you'll be the first to offer one to the masses?
Tell me again why this seems to be of little use to citizens of a country?
Friction matters! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet may, strictly speaking, not make anything possible that wasn't possible before. So what? Neither did telephones, automobiles, or even writing. People were talking to each other before telephones. People were moving around before automobiles. People were communication information to each other, even across great time spans, before there was writing.
To diminish the Internet as much as I am diminishing telephones, automobiles, and writing in the previous paragraph is as naive as it is in those cases. By making something easier, more people do it, more often, to more benefit to all.
I find when my Internet dies, the least tolerable thing to me is that I loose Google, which isn't a public library but sure does help me find information now. Which has in turn increased the quality of my own writing as I can support things better.
Would we have free software without the Internet? Probably, but it would be a mere shadow of what we have now, because the harder it is to communicate, the more likely the project won't form at all. Hell, would we be having this discussion without the Internet, and would it be anywhere near as large or as comprehensive?
Boo hoo, there's no "soundbite" for the Internet, therefore it must be useless. Bah!
Purpose is to bypass bad government (Score:4, Insightful)
Be it unethical copyright imposition, overbearing controlls on finances and money, censorship, or myrad of other obselete rules from anything to gambling to free anonymous speech. It seems to me that the internet is the best bet to bypass restrictions imposed by poor governinment the world over.
Re:Simple (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that's a bit harsh. Repetive and 'in' jokes help define a community.
Re:Its more efficient than going to a library (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean come on. What does Goatse.cx actually teach you about having sex with goats?
And if you paid any attention when they taught you library search skills, it shouldn't take you hours to find what you're looking for at the library. There is good stuff out there on the net, but you really have to scrutinize what you're looking at. When it's cheap to publish, people are much more willing to spew crap...
Changing purposes (Score:2, Insightful)
"Why do we need the Internet?" isn't a simple question anymore. There are many many different answers to that question depending on who it's put to.
There are many more uses than there used to be. There are many more users and as a result there are many more useful resources and many more bits of useless cruft.
Sometimes it's easy to let our technical biases make us yearn for the "good old days" when the frontier town wasn't so cluttered up with "city folk."
We don't *need* it (Score:2, Insightful)
People need cean water
People need shelter
People don't *need* the Internet.
It would be something for all these project to wire third world countries to remember - the Internet is great fun and all, but I don't think someone watching their child face malnutrition would find they need it quite as much as a good meal.
Re:Thats a ridiculous question to ask the internet (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to expand on this point about being able to get exotic things online. One of the great things about the net IMO is that the 'population' is so large that niche cultures become economically significant.
The perfect example of this I keep seeing is the non-asian market for japanese anime products. In the past, the market was so fragmented, only in large population centres could you get the stuff you want, and then sometimes for insane prices. If you lived in a less populous area, the local stores wouldn't stock anything because the market is so small it takes forever to move the products and when buying such quantities, the price is driven up quite a bit.
But all of the small factions of many niche groups are brought together on the 'net so their buying power becomes significant. There are now plenty of sites where you can get a very wide variety of anime products for decent prices. They can stock a lot of them and thus offer decent prices because the community is big enough.
So basically I'm saying that the internet is important because it allows niche interests to reach critical mass.
Enhancing Democracy is the killer app (Score:2, Insightful)
There are two types of people in the world: (Score:3, Insightful)
Those who just want to watch TV don't need the internet.
Oh PLEASE. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Technology fighting technology (Score:3, Insightful)
I figure you don't need the government for those things, but then again your mileage may vary. I'm also one of those who believe that totalitarianism is a breeding ground for terrorism, but then again, that's just my two cents.
Hey, lack of stuff like the TRIPs treaty is to me the main selling point of anarchy! (Been spending most of today working with swpat at FFII [ffii.org] and feeling really frustrated because of TRIPs...)
I don't like prisons either.
Look, I didn't really mean to blatantly plug anarchism, people tend to look silly when they do that (except in the eyes of other anarchists), so let's just pretend that I meant that the Internet will be the downfall of the totalitarian aspects of governments, not the entire governmental structures. Yeah...
What I mean is that traditional, one-way, top-down, ad-based media is hell of a lot more of a prison than any two-party pseudodemocratic system ever was, and Internet is part of an alternative to that.
Re:Good question (Score:2, Insightful)
I beg to differ (Score:5, Insightful)
So has the internet had a chance to shape society? Not yet
You seem to be confusing "totally dominating" and "shaping". Did radio and telephone shape society? Mail still exists. Did TV shape society? Radio still exists.
The internet has not replaced everything, but it has significantly altered many aspects of our society. It has vastly changed the nature of communication (heard of email? IM? A few people use them). It has changed the way we get information (could you get instant answers to very detailed, very obscure questions before the internet? No, because as good as reference librarians are, they don't have the sheer scope of details that Google can provide), the way we shop (Amazon? Ebay?), the way buisiness provide information (How often do you call a chain store vs. going to their website for price information, or to get location/hours), the way we get around (Mapquest)... the list goes on and on. The fact that most of these things are household words is evidence that it has, in fact, shaped our society. Not everyone has email, but almost everyone knows what it is.
I have to laugh at your assertion that the automobile is "vital for life", but that the internet has not shaped society. The automobile allows people to get together more quickly, get what they want more quickly, and generally make the country smaller, and less fragmented into isolated pieces. What does that remind me of? Oh right: the Internet.
The internet is "just another form of media delivery" the same way automobiles are "just another form of people delivery".
well simple answer.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Surely, they're joking... (Score:2, Insightful)
- Gotten movie listings in a flash
- Obtained accurate driving directions
- Connected with women quickly and efficiently
- Found new clients for my business
- Avoided bad products and found great ones
by reading online reviews written by hoi polloi
- Purchased computer parts for a fraction of
their retail price
- Sold crap I didn't need to raise a bit of cash
- Looked up symptoms I've felt to see which
illnesses they mapped to
- Chatted with a locksmith who talked me through
swapping out the doorknobs in my apartment
- Tracked down and ordered countless hard to find
books and movies I would have searched for
countless additional years for.
Oh yeah, like it's really a tool in search of a job.
The 'big city' doesn't have to be physical (Score:3, Insightful)