essay about internet in our life

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Essay on Importance of Internet: Samples for Students

Updated on
Nov 23, 2023

Internet is not just a need or luxury, it has become a household necessity. It was used as a source of entertainment but now it is impossible to work in offices or study without the Internet. When the global pandemic locked everyone in their house, it became an important medium to connect, study and work. Students were able to study without the risk of catching COVID-19 because of the Internet. The importance of the internet is also a common topic in various entrance exams such as SAT , TOEFL , and UPSC . In this blog, you will learn how to write an essay on the importance of the Internet.

This Blog Includes:

Tips to write the perfect essay on internet, sample 1 of essay on the importance of the internet (100 words), sample essay 2 – importance of the internet (150 words), sample essay 3 on use of internet for student (300 words).

Nikita Puri

Nikita is a creative writer and editor, who is always ready to learn new skills. She has great knowledge about study abroad universities, researching and writing blogs about them. Being a perfectionist, she has a habit of keeping her tasks complete on time before the OCD hits her. When Nikita is not busy working, you can find her eating while binge-watching The office. Also, she breathes music. She has done her bachelor's from Delhi University and her master's from Jamia Millia Islamia.

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Essay On Internet for Students and Children

500+ words essay on internet.

We live in the age of the internet. Also, it has become an important part of our life that we can’t live without it. Besides, the internet is an invention of high-end science and modern technology . Apart from that, we are connected to internet 24×7. Also, we can send big and small messages and information faster than ever. In this essay on the Internet, we are going to discuss various things related to the internet.

Reach of Internet

It is very difficult to estimate the area that the internet cover. Also, every second million people remain connected to it with any problem or issue. Apart from that, just like all the things the internet also has some good and bad effect on the life of people. So the first thing which we have to do is learn about the good and bad effect of the internet.

Good effects of the internet mean all those things that the internet make possible. Also, these things make our life easier and safer.

Bad effects of the internet mean all those things that we can no longer do because of the internet. Also, these things cause trouble for oneself and others too.

You can access in any corner of the world. Also, it is very easy to use and manage. In today’s world, we cannot imagine our life without it.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Uses Of Internet

From the time it first came into existence until now the internet has completed a long journey. Also, during this journey, the internet has adopted many things and became more user-friendly and interactive. Besides, every big and small things are available on internet and article or material that you require can be obtainable from internet.

Tim Berners-Lee can be called one of the main father of internet as he invented/discovered the WWW (World Wide Web) which is used on every website. Also, there are millions of pages and website on the internet that it will take you years to go through all of them.

The Internet can be used to do different things like you can learn, teach, research, write, share, receive, e-mail , explore, and surf the internet.

Read Essay on Technology here

Convenience Due To Internet

Because of internet, our lives have become more convenient as compared to the times when we don’t have internet. Earlier, we have to stand in queues to send mails (letters), for withdrawing or depositing money, to book tickets, etc. but after the dawn of the internet, all these things become quite easy. Also, we do not have to waste our precious time standing in queues.

Also, the internet has contributed a lot to the environment as much of the offices (government and private), school and colleges have become digital that saves countless paper.

Although, there is no doubt that the internet had made our life easier and convenient but we can’t leave the fact that it has caused many bigger problems in the past. And with the speed, we are becoming addict to it a day in will come when it will become our basic necessity.

{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “FAQPage”, “mainEntity”: [ { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What are the limitation of internet?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Although internet can help you with anything but there are certain limitation to it. First of it does not have a physical appearance. Secondly, it does not have emotions and thirdly, it can’t send you to a place where you can’t go (physically).” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What is the ideal age for using internet?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Nowadays everybody from small kids to adult is internet addicts. So it is difficult to decide an ideal age for using internet. However, according to researches using internet from an early age can cause problems in the child so internet usage of small children should be controlled or banned.” } } ] }

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800 Words Essay On Internet in English for Students

The internet has transformed the world in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. It has revolutionized how we communicate, access information, conduct business, and even how we entertain ourselves. The internet has become an integral part of our daily lives, and it’s hard to imagine a world without it.

At its core, the Internet is a vast network of interconnected computers and servers that allows for the exchange of information and data across the globe. It was originally conceived as a way for researchers and scientists to share information and collaborate on projects, but it has since evolved into a ubiquitous platform that has permeated every aspect of modern life.

One of the most significant impacts of the internet has been on communication. Before the internet, communication was limited by geography and time zones. People had to rely on physical mail, telephone calls, or face-to-face meetings to communicate with one another. The internet has made communication instantaneous and borderless. With the rise of email, instant messaging, video conferencing, and social media platforms, people can communicate with each other from anywhere in the world, at any time.

The internet has also revolutionized the way we access information. In the past, people had to rely on physical libraries, books, and other printed materials to access information. Today, with the internet, a wealth of information is available at our fingertips. From online encyclopedias to news websites, academic journals, and online databases, the internet has made it possible to access information on virtually any topic imaginable.

Another significant impact of the internet has been on the economy and the way we conduct business. The rise of e-commerce has made it possible for businesses to reach a global market and sell their products and services online. Online shopping has become increasingly popular, and many traditional brick-and-mortar stores have had to adapt to this new reality by establishing an online presence.

Furthermore, the internet has enabled the rise of the gig economy, where people can work as freelancers or contractors for multiple clients and projects simultaneously. This has created new opportunities for individuals to earn a living and has allowed businesses to access a global talent pool.

The internet has also had a profound impact on education. Online learning platforms and distance education programs have made it possible for students to access educational resources and attend classes from anywhere in the world. This has opened up new opportunities for people who may not have had access to traditional educational institutions due to geographical or financial constraints.

However, the internet has also brought with it a number of challenges and concerns. One of the biggest concerns is privacy and security. With so much personal information being shared online, there is a risk of data breaches and cyber attacks. Companies and individuals need to be vigilant about protecting their personal information and implementing strong cybersecurity measures.

Another concern is the spread of misinformation and fake news. The internet has made it easier for anyone to publish and share information, regardless of its accuracy or credibility. This has led to the proliferation of fake news and conspiracy theories, which can have serious consequences for individuals and society as a whole.

There is also concern about the impact of the internet on mental health and well-being. The constant exposure to social media and the pressure to curate a perfect online persona can lead to feelings of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. Additionally, the addictive nature of the internet and the constant stream of information can contribute to decreased attention spans and difficulty focusing on tasks.

Despite these challenges, the internet has proven to be an invaluable tool that has transformed the way we live, work, and interact with the world around us. It has opened up new opportunities for communication, education, and economic growth, and has made it possible for people to connect and collaborate in ways that were previously unimaginable.

As we move forward, it is important to address the challenges and concerns surrounding the internet while also embracing its potential for innovation and progress. This may involve implementing stronger cybersecurity measures, promoting digital literacy and critical thinking skills, and encouraging responsible and ethical use of the internet.

In conclusion, the internet has had a profound impact on virtually every aspect of modern life. It has revolutionized communication, education, business, and access to information. While it has brought with it a number of challenges and concerns, the internet has proven to be an invaluable tool that has transformed the way we live and interact with the world around us. As we continue to navigate the digital age, it is important to embrace the opportunities that the internet provides while also addressing its challenges and promoting responsible and ethical use.

Uses of Internet

In the 21st century, the internet has become an indispensable part of our daily lives, revolutionizing the way we connect, learn, work, and entertain ourselves. Its multifaceted uses have permeated every aspect of society, bringing about unprecedented convenience and opportunities.

Communication stands out as one of the internet’s most significant uses. Instant messaging, video calls, and social media platforms have transcended geographical barriers, allowing people to stay connected with friends and family across the globe. The internet has turned the world into a global village, fostering a sense of unity and understanding among diverse cultures.

Education has undergone a remarkable transformation due to the internet. Online courses, tutorials, and educational resources have made learning accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Students can pursue degrees, acquire new skills, and access a wealth of information at their fingertips, democratizing education and breaking down traditional barriers to learning.

The internet has also redefined the way we work. Remote collaboration tools, cloud computing, and virtual offices have become essential components of the modern workplace. This shift has not only increased efficiency but has also opened up new opportunities for freelancers and remote workers, contributing to the rise of the gig economy.

In the realm of information, the internet has become an unparalleled resource. Search engines allow us to access vast amounts of information on any topic imaginable. This democratization of information has empowered individuals, encouraging critical thinking and facilitating informed decision-making.

Entertainment has undergone a digital revolution, with streaming services, online gaming, and social media platforms providing endless avenues for amusement. The internet has not only transformed how we consume content but has also given rise to new forms of artistic expression and creativity.

In conclusion, the internet’s uses are multifaceted and far-reaching, impacting every facet of our lives. From connecting people across the globe to revolutionizing education, work, and entertainment, the internet continues to be a transformative force, shaping the present and influencing the future. As we navigate the digital landscape, it is essential to harness the potential of the internet responsibly, ensuring that it remains a force for positive change in the years to come.

Convenience Due to Internet

The advent of the internet has ushered in an era of unprecedented convenience, transforming the way we live, work, and interact with the world. In our fast-paced lives, the internet has become a cornerstone of efficiency and ease, offering a multitude of conveniences that have reshaped our daily routines.

Communication is perhaps the most obvious and impactful convenience brought about by the internet. Instant messaging, email, and social media platforms have revolutionized the way we connect with others. Whether it’s staying in touch with loved ones, collaborating with colleagues, or reaching out to friends across the globe, the internet has made communication instantaneous and seamless.

The convenience of online shopping has fundamentally altered the retail landscape. With just a few clicks, consumers can browse, compare prices, and purchase a vast array of products from the comfort of their homes. The rise of e-commerce platforms has not only made shopping more convenient but has also introduced the concept of doorstep delivery, saving time and eliminating the need for physical store visits.

Information retrieval has been transformed by the internet’s vast repository of knowledge. Search engines provide instant access to information on any conceivable topic, enabling users to quickly find answers, conduct research, and stay informed. This ease of information retrieval has empowered individuals, making knowledge more accessible than ever before.

The workplace has undergone a paradigm shift with the internet, enabling remote work and flexible schedules. Online collaboration tools, cloud computing, and virtual communication platforms have made it possible for individuals to work from virtually anywhere, reducing the constraints of traditional office settings and commuting.

Entertainment has also become infinitely more convenient through streaming services, online gaming, and digital media platforms. The ability to access a diverse range of content on-demand has given consumers unprecedented control over their entertainment choices, eliminating the need to adhere to fixed schedules or physical media.

In conclusion, the internet has woven a tapestry of convenience into the fabric of our lives. From streamlined communication and effortless online shopping to boundless information access and flexible work arrangements, the conveniences offered by the internet have become integral to our modern existence. As we navigate this digital landscape, the ongoing evolution of internet technologies continues to enhance and redefine the meaning of convenience in our interconnected world.

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Essay On Internet- FAQs

What is internet short essay.

In the modern time, internet has become is one of the most powerful and interesting tools all across the world. The Internet is a network of networks and collection of many services and resources which benefits us in various ways. Using internet we can access World Wide Web from any place.

What is Internet in 150 words?

The internet is the most recent man-made creation that connects the world. The world has narrowed down after the invention of the internet. It has demolished all boundaries, which were the barriers between people and has made everything accessible. The internet is helpful to us in different ways.

What is internet 100 words?

A. The internet, a recent man-made marvel, has brought the world closer. It has shattered all barriers and made everything accessible. The internet serves us in countless ways, from sharing information with people across the world to staying connected with our loved ones.

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The Impact of the Internet on Society: A Global Perspective

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The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, and with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in bandwidth, efficiency, and price.

People, companies, and institutions feel the depth of this technological change, but the speed and scope of the transformation has triggered all manner of utopian and dystopian perceptions that, when examined closely through methodologically rigorous empirical research, turn out not to be accurate. For instance, media often report that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of isolation, alienation, and withdrawal from society, but available evidence shows that the Internet neither isolates people nor reduces their sociability; it actually increases sociability, civic engagement, and the intensity of family and friendship relationships, in all cultures.

Our current “network society” is a product of the digital revolution and some major sociocultural changes. One of these is the rise of the “Me-centered society,” marked by an increased focus on individual growth and a decline in community understood in terms of space, work, family, and ascription in general. But individuation does not mean isolation, or the end of community. Instead, social relationships are being reconstructed on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects. Community is formed through individuals’ quests for like-minded people in a process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace, and the local space.

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• A Revolution in Business • Banking, Information, and Technology: Toward Knowledge Banking • Cyber Attacks

Globally, time spent on social networking sites surpassed time spent on e-mail in November 2007, and the number of social networking users surpassed the number of e-mail users in July 2009. Today, social networking sites are the preferred platforms for all kinds of activities, both business and personal, and sociability has dramatically increased — but it is a different kind of sociability. Most Facebook users visit the site daily, and they connect on multiple dimensions, but only on the dimensions they choose. The virtual life is becoming more social than the physical life, but it is less a virtual reality than a real virtuality, facilitating real-life work and urban living.

Because people are increasingly at ease in the Web’s multidimensionality, marketers, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the networks people construct by themselves and for themselves. At root, social-networking entrepreneurs are really selling spaces in which people can freely and autonomously construct their lives. Sites that attempt to impede free communication are soon abandoned by many users in favor of friendlier and less restricted spaces.

Perhaps the most telling expression of this new freedom is the Internet’s transformation of sociopolitical practices. Messages no longer flow solely from the few to the many, with little interactivity. Now, messages also flow from the many to the many, multimodally and interactively. By disintermediating government and corporate control of communication, horizontal communication networks have created a new landscape of social and political change.

Networked social movements have been particularly active since 2010, notably in the Arab revolutions against dictatorships and the protests against the management of the financial crisis. Online and particularly wireless communication has helped social movements pose more of a challenge to state power.

The Internet and the Web constitute the technological infrastructure of the global network society, and the understanding of their logic is a key field of research. It is only scholarly research that will enable us to cut through the myths surrounding this digital communication technology that is already a second skin for young people, yet continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand.

Read the full article here.

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Essay on Internet Uses For Students

500 + words internet essay.

The internet is described as a global network of computer systems interconnected and following the internet security protocol. However, have you ever considered why the internet is important? This 500+ Words Essay on internet advantages and disadvantages will help students ace essay writing during exams.

A combination of high-end science and advanced technology, the internet is a viral invention. Here, in an essay on the internet, students can learn about the uses and impact of the internet.

Why the Internet Is Important

The internet has undergone significant development from the time of its birth to the present. Over a period of time, the internet has become more interactive and user-friendly. It has also helped man in day-to-day transactions and interactions. The Internet is widely used for numerous functions such as learning, teaching, research, writing, sharing content or data, e-mails, job hunting, playing games, listening to music, watching videos, exploring and finally surfing the internet. Meanwhile, though it makes life easy for people, the internet also comes with a lot of pros and cons. Find the advantages and disadvantages of the internet from this essay.

Essay on Advantages of Internet

Read this essay on internet advantages to know the effects of using the internet. Look for the points mentioned below.

The internet has helped reduce the usage of paper and paperwork to a large extent by computerising offices, schools, NGOs, industries and much more.
Internet helps to provide updated information and news from all over the world
Education, business and travel have been thriving with the growth of the Internet
The internet is of high educational and entertainment value
The internet makes access to public resources, libraries and textbooks much easier
The internet makes it easy by reducing the time and energy taken to do work
Work has become more efficient, quick and accurate
Meetings and conferences are made easier with video calls and other brilliant tools

Apart from all these, as mentioned in the above paragraph on Internet uses, it helps carry out banking activities, exchange information, shop for various goods and more.

Essay on Internet Disadvantages

Despite the use of the internet and its positives, there are also some internet disadvantages. Continuous use of the internet can affect our lifestyle and health. Let us check out the disadvantages of the internet from this paragraph.

Over-dependence on the internet can lead to many health problems
People tend to spend more of their productive time doing nothing but browsing
Even if the internet is now used extensively at work, overuse of the internet could lead to depression
Quality time with friends and relatives is primarily reduced due to the use of the internet
Cybercrime has also increased as internet security and privacy are compromised

Thus, we have seen the uses of the internet and its impact on students and working professionals. While we know that overuse of the internet should be avoided, we also have to acknowledge that the internet has still not been exploited to its full potential, despite its massive growth. In conclusion, we can state that to make internet use more comfortable and pleasurable, school students should be taught about the pros and cons of using the internet, thus ensuring that they can stand up against cybercrime and ensure safety.

Also Read: Social Media Essay | Essay on Women Empowerment | Essay On Constitution of India

Frequently asked Questions on Internet Essay

What is the internet.

The internet is a global system of interconnected computers and this system uses a standardised Internet Protocol suite for communication and sharing information.

What are the top 5 uses of the Internet?

The Internet is mostly used by people to send emails and to search on any topic. It can be used to download large files. People depend on the internet for electronic news and magazines these days. A lot of people, especially the young generation use it to play interactive games and for entertainment.

What is WiFi?

WiFi is the latest wireless technology used to connect computers, tablets, smartphones and other electronic devices to the internet.

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The Impact of the Internet on Our Lives

Stepping into the digital age, our lives have become intertwined with the internet, an innovation that has revolutionized how we work, learn, communicate, and entertain ourselves. This powerful network of networks, since its emergence, has consistently evolved, profoundly altering various aspects of our day-to-day existence.

This blog aims to delve into the depths of this subject, exploring the diverse ways in which the internet has influenced our lives.

Social Impact

The internet has had profound social implications, changing the way we communicate, connect, and build relationships.

Effect on Communication

The internet has been instrumental in changing the way we communicate. Prior to its inception, communication was relatively slow and often delayed, with letter writing and telephone calls being the primary modes of communication.

Instant Messaging and Emails: With the advent of the internet, instant messaging and emails have become the new norm. Services like WhatsApp, Messenger, and various email platforms allow us to communicate instantly with individuals across the globe, breaking down geographical barriers.

Social Networking Sites: Websites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have changed the face of social interaction, allowing us to connect with a broad network of friends, family, and colleagues. These platforms have made it possible to share thoughts, ideas, and experiences in real-time, fostering a global sense of community.

Impact on Relationships

Our interpersonal relationships have been equally affected by the internet. The way we form, maintain, and even end relationships has been influenced by online platforms.

Online Dating: The rise of online dating sites and apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Match.com has significantly altered the landscape of romantic relationships. These platforms provide an opportunity to meet people outside one’s immediate social circles, providing more options for potential partners.

Maintaining Long-Distance Relationships: The internet has also made it easier to sustain long-distance relationships. With video calls, instant messaging, and social media , couples can stay connected and communicate more easily, regardless of the physical distance between them.

Rise of Social Issues

While the internet has numerous positive impacts, it has also led to new social challenges that we need to address.

Cyberbullying: The internet, particularly social media, has given rise to cyberbullying. This form of bullying occurs online and can have severe consequences for the mental health of the victims.

Privacy Concerns: With the proliferation of digital data, concerns about privacy and data security have become increasingly prevalent. Ensuring the protection of personal information in the online world remains a significant challenge in the internet era.

Economic Impact

The economic impact of the internet is vast, transforming commerce, finance, and the workplace.

The Advent of E-Commerce

The internet has been a game-changer in the world of commerce, leading to the rise of online shopping, or e-commerce. Brick-and-mortar stores are no longer the only option for consumers.

Online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba have transformed the retail landscape, allowing consumers to shop from the comfort of their homes, at any time.

Online Banking and Digital Currencies

The finance sector has also seen significant changes due to the internet.

Online Banking: Internet banking services have made financial transactions seamless and convenient. We can now make purchases, transfer funds, pay bills, and check account balances with just a few clicks.

Digital Currencies: The rise of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, is another internet-induced phenomenon. These digital currencies provide a new form of value exchange over the internet, challenging traditional financial systems.

Remote Work and Freelancing

The internet has reshaped the workplace and employment in several ways.

Remote Work: With high-speed internet and collaborative tools, many companies now allow employees to work remotely. This flexibility has changed the traditional 9-to-5 office setup and broadened job opportunities for many.

Freelancing: Platforms like Upwork and Fiverr have made it easier for professionals to offer their services on a freelance basis. These platforms connect freelancers with clients globally, providing opportunities for independent work.

Internet’s Influence on Traditional Businesses

Even traditional businesses have been influenced by the internet.

Digital Marketing: Businesses now use the internet for marketing and advertising, leveraging social media, email, and SEO to reach their target audience.

Online Services: Many traditional service providers, such as hotels, taxis, and restaurants, have gone online. Platforms like Uber, Airbnb, and Grubhub have capitalized on this trend, disrupting established industries.

Educational Impact

Education has been deeply influenced by the advent of the internet, transforming the learning landscape in unprecedented ways.

Online Learning Platforms and Courses

The internet has fundamentally altered the landscape of education, making learning more accessible and flexible than ever before.

Online Learning Platforms: Websites such as Coursera, Udemy, and Khan Academy offer a plethora of online courses in various fields, allowing individuals to learn at their own pace and from the comfort of their homes.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Universities and educational institutions around the world now offer MOOCs, providing free or low-cost access to high-quality education to anyone with an internet connection.

Access to Information and Knowledge

The internet serves as a vast library, providing unparalleled access to a wealth of information.

Search Engines: Platforms like Google have made it possible to find information on virtually any topic in seconds, significantly enhancing research and learning capabilities.

Digital Libraries and Databases: Online libraries and databases offer access to millions of books, academic articles, and other resources, facilitating in-depth research and learning.

Impact on Academic Research

The internet has significantly affected academic research, enabling collaboration and information sharing on a global scale.

Collaborative Research: The internet allows researchers from different parts of the world to collaborate, share data, and conduct joint research projects.

Open Access Journals: These online publications provide free, immediate access to research findings, accelerating the dissemination of knowledge and scientific advancements.

Health and Lifestyle Impact

The role of the internet extends to the spheres of health and lifestyle as well, revolutionizing healthcare and our daily habits.

Telemedicine and Online Health Resources

The advent of the internet has significantly influenced the healthcare sector, revolutionizing the way we access and manage health services.

Telemedicine: Internet-enabled telemedicine services allow patients to consult with healthcare professionals from the comfort of their homes. This is especially beneficial for those living in remote areas or with limited mobility.

Online Health Resources: Websites like WebMD, Mayo Clinic, and numerous health blogs offer a wealth of information on various health topics, enabling individuals to educate themselves about different medical conditions and treatment options.

Online Fitness and Wellness Platforms

The internet has also made it easier for individuals to take charge of their personal fitness and wellness.

Fitness Apps and Platforms: Services like MyFitnessPal, Strava, and Peloton provide workout routines, fitness tracking, and community support, helping users stay motivated and achieve their fitness goals.

Mindfulness and Mental Health Apps: Platforms such as Headspace and Calm promote mental well-being by providing mindfulness exercises, meditation guides, and sleep aids.

Effect on Mental Health – Positives and Negatives

While the internet offers numerous health benefits, it also poses certain mental health challenges.

Online Support Groups: The internet provides platforms for individuals dealing with mental health issues to connect with others experiencing similar challenges, offering much-needed support and understanding.

Cyber-Related Mental Health Issues: However, the constant connectivity can also lead to issues such as internet addiction, cyberbullying, and social media-induced anxiety and depression.

The Influence on Our Everyday Habits and Lifestyle

The internet has drastically changed our daily habits and lifestyle.

Digital Entertainment: Streaming platforms like Netflix and Spotify have transformed the way we consume entertainment, providing on-demand access to a vast array of movies, TV shows, and music.

Smart Home Technology: Internet-enabled smart home devices have automated many routine tasks, such as controlling lighting, temperature, and home security systems, simplifying our lives.

Political Impact

Politics and civic engagement have been significantly influenced by the internet. This section explores how digital platforms have reshaped political discourse, campaigns, and activism, creating new opportunities and challenges in the political sphere.

Internet as a Platform for Political Discourse

The internet has become a critical platform for political discourse and civic engagement, profoundly reshaping the political landscape.

Social Media and Political Discourse: Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become vital tools for political communication, allowing politicians to connect directly with citizens, express their viewpoints, and respond to current issues.

Digital Political Campaigns: Political campaigns have evolved to incorporate digital strategies, utilizing social media, emails, and websites to mobilize supporters, raise funds, and spread campaign messages.

The Role of Social Media in Elections and Politics

Social media’s influence on elections and politics cannot be overstated.

Voter Engagement: Social media platforms play a pivotal role in engaging voters, especially younger demographics. They serve as platforms for political debates, fact-checking, and spreading information about voting processes.

Influence on Election Outcomes: However, social media can also be used to spread misinformation or propaganda, which can influence public opinion and potentially impact election outcomes.

Online Activism and Protest Movements

The internet has also facilitated the rise of online activism and global protest movements.

Online Activism: Online activism, or “clicktivism,” allows individuals to support causes and engage with social issues digitally. Petition platforms like Change.org, hashtag activism on social media, and fundraising for causes online are all part of this trend.

Global Protest Movements: The internet has played a key role in organizing and amplifying protest movements worldwide, such as the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and climate change protests. These movements rely on social media and other digital tools to mobilize supporters, coordinate actions, and spread their messages globally.

The Future of the Internet

Black smartphone showing social media apps

As we look ahead, it’s clear that the internet will continue to evolve, further shaping our world in ways we can’t fully predict.

Internet of Things (IoT): The growth of IoT devices, from smart home appliances to connected cars, will continue to enhance our daily lives. These devices, communicating and interacting with each other over the internet, will automate routine tasks and provide improved services.

Increased Connectivity: With initiatives like Elon Musk’s Starlink, the future will see increased efforts to provide global internet coverage, bridging the digital divide and connecting remote areas to the world wide web.

The Emergence of New Technologies

Emerging technologies will shape the future of the internet, opening new possibilities and challenges.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML): AI and ML are set to revolutionize various sectors, from healthcare to finance. They will enable more personalized services, predictive capabilities, and automation.

Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies: Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies will likely continue to impact digital transactions, data security, and online identity verification.

Addressing Future Challenges

While the future of the internet holds immense potential, it will also bring new challenges that we need to prepare for.

Cybersecurity: As our dependence on the internet grows, so does the need for robust cybersecurity measures to protect personal and professional data.

Regulating AI and New Technologies: The ethical and regulatory aspects of AI, machine learning, and other emerging technologies will be a major focus, requiring careful consideration and legal frameworks.

The Internet and Society: Shaping Our Future Together

The future of the internet isn’t just about technology—it’s also about the people who use it.

Digital Literacy: As the internet becomes increasingly integral to our lives, promoting digital literacy will be crucial to help individuals navigate the online world safely and effectively.

Creating an Inclusive Digital Society: Ensuring equal access to the internet and digital services for all segments of society will be vital to prevent a digital divide and create a more inclusive future.

As we have journeyed through the various facets of the internet’s impact on our lives, it’s clear that this powerful technology has brought about significant changes in virtually every sphere of human endeavor, from social interactions and economic activities, to education, health, politics, and beyond.

The internet has not only transformed the way we communicate and consume information, but also how we work, learn, shop, and participate in societal and political processes. It has fostered global connectivity, broken down geographical barriers, and democratized access to information and opportunities.

While the internet has indisputably been a force for good, enabling unprecedented levels of progress and convenience, it has also introduced new challenges. Issues such as cyberbullying, privacy concerns, misinformation, and digital divide have emerged as critical areas that require our collective attention and action.

Looking ahead, the internet is set to continue evolving and shaping our world in ways we can only imagine. From the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the adoption of emerging technologies like AI and Blockchain, to the quest for universal internet access and the need for digital literacy and regulation, the future of the internet holds vast potential and challenges.

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Education: a New Learning Curve

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The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the vector of technological transformation of the Industrial Age. This global network of computer networks, largely based nowadays on platforms of wireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time, transcending space. The Internet is not really a new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969 (Abbate 1999). But it was in the 1990s when it was privatized and released from the control of the U.S. Department of Commerce that it diffused around the world at extraordinary speed: in 1996 the first survey of Internet users counted about 40 million; in 2013 they are over 2.5 billion, with China accounting for the largest number of Internet users. Furthermore, for some time the spread of the Internet was limited by the difficulty to lay out land-based telecommunications infrastructure in the emerging countries. This has changed with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, in 1991, there were about 16 million subscribers of wireless devices in the world, in 2013 they are close to 7 billion (in a planet of 7.7 billion human beings). Counting on the family and village uses of mobile phones, and taking into consideration the limited use of these devices among children under five years of age, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in the bandwidth as well as in the efficiency and price of the service.

At the heart of these communication networks the Internet ensures the production, distribution, and use of digitized information in all formats. According to the study published by Martin Hilbert in Science (Hilbert and López 2011), 95 percent of all information existing in the planet is digitized and most of it is accessible on the Internet and other computer networks.

The speed and scope of the transformation of our communication environment by Internet and wireless communication has triggered all kind of utopian and dystopian perceptions around the world.

As in all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.

The media aggravate the distorted perception by dwelling into scary reports on the basis of anecdotal observation and biased commentary. If there is a topic in which social sciences, in their diversity, should contribute to the full understanding of the world in which we live, it is precisely the area that has come to be named in academia as Internet Studies. Because, in fact, academic research knows a great deal on the interaction between Internet and society, on the basis of methodologically rigorous empirical research conducted in a plurality of cultural and institutional contexts. Any process of major technological change generates its own mythology. In part because it comes into practice before scientists can assess its effects and implications, so there is always a gap between social change and its understanding. For instance, media often report that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of alienation, isolation, depression, and withdrawal from society. In fact, available evidence shows that there is either no relationship or a positive cumulative relationship between the Internet use and the intensity of sociability. We observe that, overall, the more sociable people are, the more they use the Internet. And the more they use the Internet, the more they increase their sociability online and offline, their civic engagement, and the intensity of family and friendship relationships, in all cultures—with the exception of a couple of early studies of the Internet in the 1990s, corrected by their authors later (Castells 2001; Castells et al. 2007; Rainie and Wellman 2012; Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.).

Thus, the purpose of this chapter will be to summarize some of the key research findings on the social effects of the Internet relying on the evidence provided by some of the major institutions specialized in the social study of the Internet. More specifically, I will be using the data from the world at large: the World Internet Survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future, University of Southern California; the reports of the British Computer Society (BCS), using data from the World Values Survey of the University of Michigan; the Nielsen reports for a variety of countries; and the annual reports from the International Telecommunications Union. For data on the United States, I have used the Pew American Life and Internet Project of the Pew Institute. For the United Kingdom, the Oxford Internet Survey from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, as well as the Virtual Society Project from the Economic and Social Science Research Council. For Spain, the Project Internet Catalonia of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC); the various reports on the information society from Telefónica; and from the Orange Foundation. For Portugal, the Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC) in Lisbon. I would like to emphasize that most of the data in these reports converge toward similar trends. Thus I have selected for my analysis the findings that complement and reinforce each other, offering a consistent picture of the human experience on the Internet in spite of the human diversity.

Given the aim of this publication to reach a broad audience, I will not present in this text the data supporting the analysis presented here. Instead, I am referring the interested reader to the web sources of the research organizations mentioned above, as well as to selected bibliographic references discussing the empirical foundation of the social trends reported here.

Technologies of Freedom, the Network Society, and the Culture of Autonomy

In order to fully understand the effects of the Internet on society, we should remember that technology is material culture. It is produced in a social process in a given institutional environment on the basis of the ideas, values, interests, and knowledge of their producers, both their early producers and their subsequent producers. In this process we must include the users of the technology, who appropriate and adapt the technology rather than adopting it, and by so doing they modify it and produce it in an endless process of interaction between technological production and social use. So, to assess the relevance of Internet in society we must recall the specific characteristics of Internet as a technology. Then we must place it in the context of the transformation of the overall social structure, as well as in relationship to the culture characteristic of this social structure. Indeed, we live in a new social structure, the global network society, characterized by the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy.

Internet is a technology of freedom, in the terms coined by Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1973, coming from a libertarian culture, paradoxically financed by the Pentagon for the benefit of scientists, engineers, and their students, with no direct military application in mind (Castells 2001). The expansion of the Internet from the mid-1990s onward resulted from the combination of three main factors:

The technological discovery of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and his willingness to distribute the source code to improve it by the open-source contribution of a global community of users, in continuity with the openness of the TCP/IP Internet protocols. The web keeps running under the same principle of open source. And two-thirds of web servers are operated by Apache, an open-source server program.
Institutional change in the management of the Internet, keeping it under the loose management of the global Internet community, privatizing it, and allowing both commercial uses and cooperative uses.
Major changes in social structure, culture, and social behavior: networking as a prevalent organizational form; individuation as the main orientation of social behavior; and the culture of autonomy as the culture of the network society.

I will elaborate on these major trends.

Our society is a network society; that is, a society constructed around personal and organizational networks powered by digital networks and communicated by the Internet. And because networks are global and know no boundaries, the network society is a global network society. This historically specific social structure resulted from the interaction between the emerging technological paradigm based on the digital revolution and some major sociocultural changes. A primary dimension of these changes is what has been labeled the rise of the Me-centered society, or, in sociological terms, the process of individuation, the decline of community understood in terms of space, work, family, and ascription in general. This is not the end of community, and not the end of place-based interaction, but there is a shift toward the reconstruction of social relationships, including strong cultural and personal ties that could be considered a form of community, on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects.

The process of individuation is not just a matter of cultural evolution, it is materially produced by the new forms of organizing economic activities, and social and political life, as I analyzed in my trilogy on the Information Age (Castells 1996–2003). It is based on the transformation of space (metropolitan life), work and economic activity (rise of the networked enterprise and networked work processes), culture and communication (shift from mass communication based on mass media to mass self-communication based on the Internet); on the crisis of the patriarchal family, with increasing autonomy of its individual members; the substitution of media politics for mass party politics; and globalization as the selective networking of places and processes throughout the planet.

But individuation does not mean isolation, or even less the end of community. Sociability is reconstructed as networked individualism and community through a quest for like-minded individuals in a process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace and the local space. Individuation is the key process in constituting subjects (individual or collective), networking is the organizational form constructed by these subjects; this is the network society, and the form of sociability is what Rainie and Wellman (2012) conceptualized as networked individualism. Network technologies are of course the medium for this new social structure and this new culture (Papacharissi 2010).

As stated above, academic research has established that the Internet does not isolate people, nor does it reduce their sociability; it actually increases sociability, as shown by myself in my studies in Catalonia (Castells 2007), Rainie and Wellman in the United States (2012), Cardoso in Portugal (2010), and the World Internet Survey for the world at large (Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.). Furthermore, a major study by Michael Willmott for the British Computer Society (Trajectory Partnership 2010) has shown a positive correlation, for individuals and for countries, between the frequency and intensity of the use of the Internet and the psychological indicators of personal happiness. He used global data for 35,000 people obtained from the World Wide Survey of the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2007. Controlling for other factors, the study showed that Internet use empowers people by increasing their feelings of security, personal freedom, and influence, all feelings that have a positive effect on happiness and personal well-being. The effect is particularly positive for people with lower income and who are less qualified, for people in the developing world, and for women. Age does not affect the positive relationship; it is significant for all ages. Why women? Because they are at the center of the network of their families, Internet helps them to organize their lives. Also, it helps them to overcome their isolation, particularly in patriarchal societies. The Internet also contributes to the rise of the culture of autonomy.

The key for the process of individuation is the construction of autonomy by social actors, who become subjects in the process. They do so by defining their specific projects in interaction with, but not submission to, the institutions of society. This is the case for a minority of individuals, but because of their capacity to lead and mobilize they introduce a new culture in every domain of social life: in work (entrepreneurship), in the media (the active audience), in the Internet (the creative user), in the market (the informed and proactive consumer), in education (students as informed critical thinkers, making possible the new frontier of e-learning and m-learning pedagogy), in health (the patient-centered health management system) in e-government (the informed, participatory citizen), in social movements (cultural change from the grassroots, as in feminism or environmentalism), and in politics (the independent-minded citizen able to participate in self-generated political networks).

There is increasing evidence of the direct relationship between the Internet and the rise of social autonomy. From 2002 to 2007 I directed in Catalonia one of the largest studies ever conducted in Europe on the Internet and society, based on 55,000 interviews, one-third of them face to face (IN3 2002–07). As part of this study, my collaborators and I compared the behavior of Internet users to non-Internet users in a sample of 3,000 people, representative of the population of Catalonia. Because in 2003 only about 40 percent of people were Internet users we could really compare the differences in social behavior for users and non-users, something that nowadays would be more difficult given the 79 percent penetration rate of the Internet in Catalonia. Although the data are relatively old, the findings are not, as more recent studies in other countries (particularly in Portugal) appear to confirm the observed trends. We constructed scales of autonomy in different dimensions. Only between 10 and 20 percent of the population, depending on dimensions, were in the high level of autonomy. But we focused on this active segment of the population to explore the role of the Internet in the construction of autonomy. Using factor analysis we identified six major types of autonomy based on projects of individuals according to their practices:

a) professional development b) communicative autonomy c) entrepreneurship d) autonomy of the body e) sociopolitical participation f) personal, individual autonomy

These six types of autonomous practices were statistically independent among themselves. But each one of them correlated positively with Internet use in statistically significant terms, in a self-reinforcing loop (time sequence): the more one person was autonomous, the more she/he used the web, and the more she/he used the web, the more autonomous she/he became (Castells et al. 2007). This is a major empirical finding. Because if the dominant cultural trend in our society is the search for autonomy, and if the Internet powers this search, then we are moving toward a society of assertive individuals and cultural freedom, regardless of the barriers of rigid social organizations inherited from the Industrial Age. From this Internet-based culture of autonomy have emerged a new kind of sociability, networked sociability, and a new kind of sociopolitical practice, networked social movements and networked democracy. I will now turn to the analysis of these two fundamental trends at the source of current processes of social change worldwide.

The Rise of Social Network Sites on the Internet

Since 2002 (creation of Friendster, prior to Facebook) a new socio-technical revolution has taken place on the Internet: the rise of social network sites where now all human activities are present, from personal interaction to business, to work, to culture, to communication, to social movements, and to politics.

Social Network Sites are web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

(Boyd and Ellison 2007, 2)

Social networking uses, in time globally spent, surpassed e-mail in November 2007. It surpassed e-mail in number of users in July 2009. In terms of users it reached 1 billion by September 2010, with Facebook accounting for about half of it. In 2013 it has almost doubled, particularly because of increasing use in China, India, and Latin America. There is indeed a great diversity of social networking sites (SNS) by countries and cultures. Facebook, started for Harvard-only members in 2004, is present in most of the world, but QQ, Cyworld, and Baidu dominate in China; Orkut in Brazil; Mixi in Japan; etc. In terms of demographics, age is the main differential factor in the use of SNS, with a drop of frequency of use after 50 years of age, and particularly 65. But this is not just a teenager’s activity. The main Facebook U.S. category is in the age group 35–44, whose frequency of use of the site is higher than for younger people. Nearly 60 percent of adults in the U.S. have at least one SNS profile, 30 percent two, and 15 percent three or more. Females are as present as males, except when in a society there is a general gender gap. We observe no differences in education and class, but there is some class specialization of SNS, such as Myspace being lower than FB; LinkedIn is for professionals.

Thus, the most important activity on the Internet at this point in time goes through social networking, and SNS have become the chosen platforms for all kind of activities, not just personal friendships or chatting, but for marketing, e-commerce, education, cultural creativity, media and entertainment distribution, health applications, and sociopolitical activism. This is a significant trend for society at large. Let me explore the meaning of this trend on the basis of the still scant evidence.

Social networking sites are constructed by users themselves building on specific criteria of grouping. There is entrepreneurship in the process of creating sites, then people choose according to their interests and projects. Networks are tailored by people themselves with different levels of profiling and privacy. The key to success is not anonymity, but on the contrary, self-presentation of a real person connecting to real people (in some cases people are excluded from the SNS when they fake their identity). So, it is a self-constructed society by networking connecting to other networks. But this is not a virtual society. There is a close connection between virtual networks and networks in life at large. This is a hybrid world, a real world, not a virtual world or a segregated world.

People build networks to be with others, and to be with others they want to be with on the basis of criteria that include those people who they already know (a selected sub-segment). Most users go on the site every day. It is permanent connectivity. If we needed an answer to what happened to sociability in the Internet world, here it is:

There is a dramatic increase in sociability, but a different kind of sociability, facilitated and dynamized by permanent connectivity and social networking on the web.

Based on the time when Facebook was still releasing data (this time is now gone) we know that in 2009 users spent 500 billion minutes per month. This is not just about friendship or interpersonal communication. People do things together, share, act, exactly as in society, although the personal dimension is always there. Thus, in the U.S. 38 percent of adults share content, 21 percent remix, 14 percent blog, and this is growing exponentially, with development of technology, software, and SNS entrepreneurial initiatives. On Facebook, in 2009 the average user was connected to 60 pages, groups, and events, people interacted per month to 160 million objects (pages, groups, events), the average user created 70 pieces of content per month, and there were 25 billion pieces of content shared per month (web links, news stories, blogs posts, notes, photos). SNS are living spaces connecting all dimensions of people’s experience. This transforms culture because people share experience with a low emotional cost, while saving energy and effort. They transcend time and space, yet they produce content, set up links, and connect practices. It is a constantly networked world in every dimension of human experience. They co-evolve in permanent, multiple interaction. But they choose the terms of their co-evolution.

Thus, people live their physical lives but increasingly connect on multiple dimensions in SNS.

Paradoxically, the virtual life is more social than the physical life, now individualized by the organization of work and urban living.

But people do not live a virtual reality, indeed it is a real virtuality, since social practices, sharing, mixing, and living in society is facilitated in the virtuality, in what I called time ago the “space of flows” (Castells 1996).

Because people are increasingly at ease in the multi-textuality and multidimensionality of the web, marketers, work organizations, service agencies, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the Internet, less and less setting up alternative sites, more and more being present in the networks that people construct by themselves and for themselves, with the help of Internet social networking entrepreneurs, some of whom become billionaires in the process, actually selling freedom and the possibility of the autonomous construction of lives. This is the liberating potential of the Internet made material practice by these social networking sites. The largest of these social networking sites are usually bounded social spaces managed by a company. However, if the company tries to impede free communication it may lose many of its users, because the entry barriers in this industry are very low. A couple of technologically savvy youngsters with little capital can set up a site on the Internet and attract escapees from a more restricted Internet space, as happened to AOL and other networking sites of the first generation, and as could happen to Facebook or any other SNS if they are tempted to tinker with the rules of openness (Facebook tried to make users pay and retracted within days). So, SNS are often a business, but they are in the business of selling freedom, free expression, chosen sociability. When they tinker with this promise they risk their hollowing by net citizens migrating with their friends to more friendly virtual lands.

Perhaps the most telling expression of this new freedom is the transformation of sociopolitical practices on the Internet.

Communication Power: Mass-Self Communication and the Transformation of Politics

Power and counterpower, the foundational relationships of society, are constructed in the human mind, through the construction of meaning and the processing of information according to certain sets of values and interests (Castells 2009).

Ideological apparatuses and the mass media have been key tools of mediating communication and asserting power, and still are. But the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy, has found in Internet and mobile communication networks a major medium of mass self-communication and self-organization.

The key source for the social production of meaning is the process of socialized communication. I define communication as the process of sharing meaning through the exchange of information. Socialized communication is the one that exists in the public realm, that has the potential of reaching society at large. Therefore, the battle over the human mind is largely played out in the process of socialized communication. And this is particularly so in the network society, the social structure of the Information Age, which is characterized by the pervasiveness of communication networks in a multimodal hypertext.

The ongoing transformation of communication technology in the digital age extends the reach of communication media to all domains of social life in a network that is at the same time global and local, generic and customized, in an ever-changing pattern.

As a result, power relations, that is the relations that constitute the foundation of all societies, as well as the processes challenging institutionalized power relations, are increasingly shaped and decided in the communication field. Meaningful, conscious communication is what makes humans human. Thus, any major transformation in the technology and organization of communication is of utmost relevance for social change. Over the last four decades the advent of the Internet and of wireless communication has shifted the communication process in society at large from mass communication to mass self-communication. This is from a message sent from one to many with little interactivity to a system based on messages from many to many, multimodal, in chosen time, and with interactivity, so that senders are receivers and receivers are senders. And both have access to a multimodal hypertext in the web that constitutes the endlessly changing backbone of communication processes.

The transformation of communication from mass communication to mass self-communication has contributed decisively to alter the process of social change. As power relationships have always been based on the control of communication and information that feed the neural networks constitutive of the human mind, the rise of horizontal networks of communication has created a new landscape of social and political change by the process of disintermediation of the government and corporate controls over communication. This is the power of the network, as social actors build their own networks on the basis of their projects, values, and interests. The outcome of these processes is open ended and dependent on specific contexts. Freedom, in this case freedom of communicate, does not say anything on the uses of freedom in society. This is to be established by scholarly research. But we need to start from this major historical phenomenon: the building of a global communication network based on the Internet, a technology that embodies the culture of freedom that was at its source.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century there have been multiple social movements around the world that have used the Internet as their space of formation and permanent connectivity, among the movements and with society at large. These networked social movements, formed in the social networking sites on the Internet, have mobilized in the urban space and in the institutional space, inducing new forms of social movements that are the main actors of social change in the network society. Networked social movements have been particularly active since 2010, and especially in the Arab revolutions against dictatorships; in Europe and the U.S. as forms of protest against the management of the financial crisis; in Brazil; in Turkey; in Mexico; and in highly diverse institutional contexts and economic conditions. It is precisely the similarity of the movements in extremely different contexts that allows the formulation of the hypothesis that this is the pattern of social movements characteristic of the global network society. In all cases we observe the capacity of these movements for self-organization, without a central leadership, on the basis of a spontaneous emotional movement. In all cases there is a connection between Internet-based communication, mobile networks, and the mass media in different forms, feeding into each other and amplifying the movement locally and globally.

These movements take place in the context of exploitation and oppression, social tensions and social struggles; but struggles that were not able to successfully challenge the state in other instances of revolt are now powered by the tools of mass self-communication. It is not the technology that induces the movements, but without the technology (Internet and wireless communication) social movements would not take the present form of being a challenge to state power. The fact is that technology is material culture (ideas brought into the design) and the Internet materialized the culture of freedom that, as it has been documented, emerged on American campuses in the 1960s. This culture-made technology is at the source of the new wave of social movements that exemplify the depth of the global impact of the Internet in all spheres of social organization, affecting particularly power relationships, the foundation of the institutions of society. (See case studies and an analytical perspective on the interaction between Internet and networked social movements in Castells 2012.)

The Internet, as all technologies, does not produce effects by itself. Yet, it has specific effects in altering the capacity of the communication system to be organized around flows that are interactive, multimodal, asynchronous or synchronous, global or local, and from many to many, from people to people, from people to objects, and from objects to objects, increasingly relying on the semantic web. How these characteristics affect specific systems of social relationships has to be established by research, and this is what I tried to present in this text. What is clear is that without the Internet we would not have seen the large-scale development of networking as the fundamental mechanism of social structuring and social change in every domain of social life. The Internet, the World Wide Web, and a variety of networks increasingly based on wireless platforms constitute the technological infrastructure of the network society, as the electrical grid and the electrical engine were the support system for the form of social organization that we conceptualized as the industrial society. Thus, as a social construction, this technological system is open ended, as the network society is an open-ended form of social organization that conveys the best and the worse in humankind. Yet, the global network society is our society, and the understanding of its logic on the basis of the interaction between culture, organization, and technology in the formation and development of social and technological networks is a key field of research in the twenty-first century.

We can only make progress in our understanding through the cumulative effort of scholarly research. Only then we will be able to cut through the myths surrounding the key technology of our time. A digital communication technology that is already a second skin for young people, yet it continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand.

These references are in fact sources of more detailed references specific to each one of the topics analyzed in this text.

Abbate, Janet. A Social History of the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007).

Cardoso, Gustavo, Angus Cheong, and Jeffrey Cole (eds). World Wide Internet: Changing Societies, Economies and Cultures. Macau: University of Macau Press, 2009.

Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–2003.

———. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

———. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

———. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

Castells, Manuel, Imma Tubella, Teresa Sancho, and Meritxell Roca.

La transición a la sociedad red. Barcelona: Ariel, 2007.

Hilbert, Martin, and Priscilla López. “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information.” Science 332, no. 6025 (April 1, 2011): pp. 60–65.

Papacharissi, Zizi, ed. The Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Networking Sites. Routledge, 2010.

Rainie. Lee, and Barry Wellman. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Trajectory Partnership (Michael Willmott and Paul Flatters). The Information Dividend: Why IT Makes You “Happier.” Swindon: British Informatics Society Limited, 2010. http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/info-dividend-full-report.pdf

Selected Web References. Used as sources for analysis in the chapter

Agência para a Sociedade do Conhecimento. “Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC).” http://www.umic.pt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3026&Itemid=167

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. “Features, Press and Policy.” http://www.bcs.org/category/7307

Center for the Digital Future. The World Internet Project International Report. 4th ed. Los Angeles: USC Annenberg School, Center for the Digital Future, 2012. http://www.worldinternetproject.net/_files/_Published/_oldis/770_2012wip_report4th_ed.pdf

ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council). “Papers and Reports.” Virtual Society. http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk/reports.htm

Fundación Orange. “Análisis y Prospectiva: Informe eEspaña.” Fundación Orange. http://fundacionorange.es/fundacionorange/analisisprospectiva.html

Fundación Telefónica. “Informes SI.” Fundación Telefónica. http://sociedadinformacion.fundacion.telefonica.com/DYC/SHI/InformesSI/seccion=1190&idioma=es_ES.do

IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute). UOC. “Project Internet Catalonia (PIC): An Overview.” Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, 2002–07. http://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic/eng/

International Telecommunication Union. “Annual Reports.” http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/sfo/annual_reports/index.html

Nielsen Company. “Reports.” 2013. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/reports/2013.html?tag=Category:Media+ and+Entertainment

Oxford Internet Surveys. “Publications.” http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/oxis/publications

Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Social Networking.” Pew Internet. http://www.pewinternet.org/Topics/Activities-and-Pursuits/Social-Networking.aspx?typeFilter=5

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Internet Essay

Essay on Internet

Introduction.

The Internet is a system of interconnection of computer networks that link several billion devices worldwide. It is a global network of networks that consists of millions of non-public, public, academic, business and government packet-switched networks, joined by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an intensive variety of information resources and services, like applications of the world wide web (www), the infrastructure to support email, peer-to-peer networks for file sharing and telephony. It has become an important part of our life and we cannot live without it. The Internet can be called the discovery of man that has revolutionized his style of working and living.

The Internet was started as the creation of a small band of dedicated researchers and has grown to be a commercial success with billions of dollars of annual investments. It has completely reduced distance, minimized all limitations and made our world relatively a smaller place. The Internet has brought information to our doorstep at the click of a button. The Internet revolutionized the computer and world of communication like never before.

Advantages of Internet

The Internet is replete with countless advantages. It has made possible man’s access to countless websites, information programs, scientific discoveries, global political, social, economic and cultural developments and happenings, libraries, entertainment and much more.

The Internet boom in India has become one of the major contributors to the economic growth of the country. It has revolutionized the metros, the towns and the villages. The Internet has contributed massively to the employment sector across the country. The need for professionals has increased who would feed the information into the web. Content writing and management, web page designing, Internet advertisements have become booming sectors within the IT industry.

In the education field, learners can coordinate projects with classrooms all over the globe. Students across the globe do research works online and all information related to research is accessible on the web at the touch of a button. Not only for the students, but the Internet has also become an incredible tool for job seekers.

The Internet is being used for finding people, places or information on any subject. One can use the directory services to search phone books of any country together with zip codes. People are connecting with friends and families by exchanging emails to facilitate letter-writing, keeping down the cost of phone calls.

In the field of travel, cities, towns, states and countries are using the web to post detailed tourist and event information. Travelers can easily find information on weather, maps, timings for events and transportation schedules and buy tickets to various tourists’ spots.

Today the Internet is used for shopping, paying utility bills, credit card bills, admission fees, E-commerce, online banking facility. In the world of marketing and sales, companies are marketing and selling their products and creating brands over the net.

Patients and doctors keep up-to-date with the latest medical findings, share treatment information and give one another support in medical problems.

Furthermore, people are also finding partners through matchmaking sites.

Today, people are doing financial research; trading like buying and selling stock and investing money.

However, the Internet has some setbacks too, which is a threat to the entire mankind. People, especially youngsters are getting addicted to the Internet and thus causing problems to their health. It is making this generation lazy. Internet hackers are on the rise, creating nuisance in the world of business and communication. There are a lot of thefts, frauds and unscrupulous businesses cropping up that are taking undue advantage of innocent people. Anti-social elements of society and cybercrime are also using the Internet against humanity.

Internet is a great tool that man has discovered but its wrong use and negative impact must be minimized.

FAQs on Internet Essay

1. What is the Internet?

The Internet is a computerized network of information. It is a system of interconnection of computer networks that link several billions of devices. The global system of interconnected computer networks, popularly known as, the internet brings the internet protocol suite, that is, TCP/IP into use to communicate between networks and devices. This network consists of private, academic, public, government and business networks that range from local scope to global scope linked by technologies including wireless, electronic and optical networking. There is a broad range of information resources and services on the internet. These resources include the world wide web (www), telephony, electronic mails, file sharing, and interlinked hypertext documents.

2. What are the Advantages of the Internet?

The Internet has brought information to our doorstep. It has made possible man’s access to countless websites, information programs, scientific discoveries, global political, social, economic and cultural developments and happenings, libraries, entertainment and much more. The spread of the internet across the globe has increased connectivity, communication, and sharing between people. With the accessibility of all kinds of languages, the internet has now become a hub of information, knowledge, and learning for people of all ages and all backgrounds. Internets also now act as an address book as they provide the contact information of people through social networking websites. The Internet has now also become a platform for selling all kinds of items and making money through it without much investment. Therefore, the internet facilitates business opportunities for many people. The Internet is now also used for entertainment purposes, banking, payment of bills, shopping, donations and funds, cloud computing, and cloud storage. In recent times, we have also seen how the internet has made work from home, collaboration, and access to the global workforce an easy possibility.

3. What are the Disadvantages of the Internet?

Some of the disadvantages of the Internet: people especially, the youngsters are getting highly addicted to the Internet. There are a lot of thefts, fraudulent activities and unscrupulous business happening, which have become a threat to humankind. The main disadvantages of the widespread use of the internet are:

The Internet is an addiction that causes distraction, affects focus and patience, and wastes the time of students when not used for the right purposes.

Bullying, trolling and stalking have now become a common task for people due to the Internet.

The Internet has also increased the crime rates in the country.

There are a lot of spam emails and advertisements that flourish throughout the internet.

Internet is also now made a tool for pornography and violent images.

With the internet, now everyone is connected to their work every time. There is no holiday or family time left now.

Internets have also made identity thefts, hacking, and cheating possible.

It is also a proven fact that since people spend the majority of their time sitting over the internet, it has greatly increased health issues and obesity in people.

People most often end up buying things that they don't need because of exchange policy and net banking.

The Internet is surely not a safe place for children to spend their time.

4. How has the Internet Become a Boon to India?

The Internet in India has made revolutionary changes in the metros, small towns and villages. It has created a plethora of job opportunities. The rise in the use of the Internet has led to the growth of cyber cities, cyber cafes and Internet parlors across the country. The main advantages of the widespread use of the internet are:

The Internet has made connectivity, communication, and sharing of documents and related data very easy.

The Internet is a library of information, knowledge, and learning for people of all ages and from all fields.

The Internet has facilitated online shopping, thereby giving business opportunities to many entrepreneurs.

Apart from business, there are various jobs available over the internet.

With the advent of net banking and mobile banking, the internet has made banking-related jobs easy.

The Internet has now become one of the biggest sources of entertainment with thousands of web series, movies, and shows.

The widespread use of the internet has made work from home job opportunities possible and easy.

It has also grown possibilities of collaboration and access to a global workforce for businesses.

Cloud computing and cloud storage facilities have increased access to data across multiple devices.

5. How has the Internet made our life easier and convenient?

The widespread usage of the internet in all corners of the world has made our lives more convenient as compared to the times when there was no internet. Earlier, people used to stand in long queues for any of their work whether it was to send letters to their loved ones, book movie tickets, train tickets, flight tickets, or for bank-related work like withdrawing money and depositing money. Now, all this work can be done over the internet without the need to stand in queues and wait. Emails and chat applications have completely stopped the trend of sending letters. Booking tickets for any purpose is now easily done from the comfort of home using a mobile phone or laptop. Also, net banking and phone banking services have minimized the need for a person to go to the bank for any purpose. Surely, the internet has made lives much easier than they otherwise were.

Essay on Importance of Internet

Students are often asked to write an essay on Importance of Internet in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Importance of Internet

Introduction.

The Internet is a powerful tool that has transformed our lives. It is a network of computers that allows us to access information, communicate, and perform various tasks.

Access to Information

The Internet provides a vast amount of information on every subject imaginable. It helps students in their studies and keeps us updated with the world.

Communication

The Internet has made communication easier and faster. We can chat, video call, and email anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Online Services

From shopping to banking, the Internet offers numerous services. It saves time and makes our lives convenient.

In a nutshell, the Internet plays a crucial role in our lives. It’s essential for education, communication, and services.

Also check:

Paragraph on Importance of Internet

250 Words Essay on Importance of Internet

The lifeline of modern society: the internet.

The internet, often referred to as the “network of networks,” has become an integral part of our lives. Its significance cannot be overstated as it has revolutionized communication, education, business, and entertainment.

Communication and Information Access

The internet has transformed the way we communicate. Emails, social media, and video conferencing have made it possible to connect with anyone, anywhere, at any time. It has also made information access easier than ever. The vast ocean of data available online has made the internet a primary source of information, research, and news.

Education and Learning

The internet has significantly impacted education. With the advent of online courses, learning has become more accessible. It has broken the barriers of geography, allowing students to learn from the best educators worldwide. Moreover, the internet acts as an enormous library, offering countless resources for academic research and knowledge expansion.

Business and Commerce

The internet has also revolutionized business operations. It has facilitated global trade, enabling businesses to expand their reach beyond geographical boundaries. E-commerce platforms have made buying and selling goods globally a simple process. Furthermore, digital marketing strategies have allowed businesses to target their audience more effectively.

Entertainment and Leisure

Lastly, the internet has transformed the entertainment industry. Streaming platforms have made movies, music, and games readily available. Social media platforms provide a space for sharing creative content and personal experiences.

In conclusion, the internet has significantly shaped our world, influencing various aspects of our lives. Its importance is undeniable, and its potential for future advancements is limitless.

500 Words Essay on Importance of Internet

The advent of the internet.

The internet, a global network connecting millions of computers, has revolutionized the world, transforming every facet of our lives. It’s not just a technology; it’s a phenomenon that has reshaped our societies, economies, and cultures.

The Internet as a Source of Knowledge

The internet has democratized access to knowledge. No longer do we need to physically visit a library to access books or research materials. A vast repository of information is just a click away, enabling us to learn about virtually any topic. Websites like Wikipedia, academic databases, and online libraries have made it possible for anyone with internet access to become a self-learner.

Facilitating Communication and Collaboration

The internet has also transformed the way we communicate. Email, social media, and instant messaging have made communication faster and more efficient. The internet has made it possible to connect with people across the globe instantaneously, breaking down geographical barriers. This has also fostered global collaboration, allowing people from different parts of the world to work together on projects or ideas.

Impact on Economy and Commerce

The internet has had a profound impact on the economy. It has given rise to a new form of commerce – e-commerce, enabling businesses to reach a global audience. Companies like Amazon and Alibaba have revolutionized retail, while platforms like Airbnb and Uber have disrupted traditional industries. The internet has also created new job opportunities, from digital marketing to web development.

Entertainment and Media

The internet has reshaped the entertainment industry. Streaming platforms like Netflix and Spotify have changed the way we consume media, offering a vast selection of movies, series, and music on demand. Social media platforms like YouTube have given rise to a new kind of celebrity – the influencer, who can reach millions of followers with a single post.

The Internet and Social Change

The internet has also been a catalyst for social change. It has given a voice to those who were previously unheard, enabling them to share their stories and mobilize for change. Social media platforms have played a key role in movements like the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter, demonstrating the power of the internet to drive social change.

The importance of the internet cannot be overstated. It has transformed our world, reshaping the way we learn, communicate, do business, and engage with our society. As we move further into the digital age, the internet will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping our future. However, as with any powerful tool, it is important that we use the internet responsibly, ensuring it is a force for good in our world.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Essay on Disadvantages of Internet
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The Impact of The Internet on Society's Everyday Life

Categories: Impact of Technology Internet

About this sample

Words: 2577 |

13 min read

Published: Feb 8, 2022

Words: 2577 | Pages: 6 | 13 min read

Amichai-Hamburger, & Zack Hayat – computers in human behavior, 2011.
Glor, Jeff. ‘‘Cyberbullying Continued After Teens Death.’’ New York, NY: CBS Interactive Inc. March 29, 2010. Web.
LM Hinman –Ethics and information technology , 2002-researchgate.net
Kumar, M. (2011). Impact of the evolution of smart phones in education technology and its application in technical and professional studies: Indian perspective. International Journal of Managing Information Technology (IJMIT), 3(3), 39-49.
Phillip EN Howard, Lee Rainie, Steve Jones – American behavioral scientist 45 (3), 383 -404, 2001 Retrieved 24 January 2020, from http://www.internetlivestats.com/

Should follow an “upside down” triangle format, meaning, the writer should start off broad and introduce the text and author or topic being discussed, and then get more specific to the thesis statement.

Provides a foundational overview, outlining the historical context and introducing key information that will be further explored in the essay, setting the stage for the argument to follow.

Cornerstone of the essay, presenting the central argument that will be elaborated upon and supported with evidence and analysis throughout the rest of the paper.

The topic sentence serves as the main point or focus of a paragraph in an essay, summarizing the key idea that will be discussed in that paragraph.

The body of each paragraph builds an argument in support of the topic sentence, citing information from sources as evidence.

After each piece of evidence is provided, the author should explain HOW and WHY the evidence supports the claim.

Should follow a right side up triangle format, meaning, specifics should be mentioned first such as restating the thesis, and then get more broad about the topic at hand. Lastly, leave the reader with something to think about and ponder once they are done reading.

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The internet and the pandemic, 90% of americans say the internet has been essential or important to them, many made video calls and 40% used technology in new ways. but while tech was a lifeline for some, others faced struggles.

Pew Research Center has a long history of studying technology adoption trends and the impact of digital technology on society. This report focuses on American adults’ experiences with and attitudes about their internet and technology use during the COVID-19 outbreak. For this analysis, we surveyed 4,623 U.S. adults from April 12-18, 2021. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Chapter 1 of this report includes responses to an open-ended question and the overall report includes a number of quotations to help illustrate themes and add nuance to the survey findings. Quotations may have been lightly edited for grammar, spelling and clarity. The first three themes mentioned in each open-ended response, according to a researcher-developed codebook, were coded into categories for analysis.

Here are the questions used for this report , along with responses, and its methodology .

Technology has been a lifeline for some during the coronavirus outbreak but some have struggled, too

The coronavirus has transformed many aspects of Americans’ lives. It shut down schools, businesses and workplaces and forced millions to stay at home for extended lengths of time. Public health authorities recommended limits on social contact to try to contain the spread of the virus, and these profoundly altered the way many worked, learned, connected with loved ones, carried out basic daily tasks, celebrated and mourned. For some, technology played a role in this transformation.

Results from a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted April 12-18, 2021, reveal the extent to which people’s use of the internet has changed, their views about how helpful technology has been for them and the struggles some have faced.

The vast majority of adults (90%) say the internet has been at least important to them personally during the pandemic, the survey finds. The share who say it has been essential – 58% – is up slightly from 53% in April 2020. There have also been upticks in the shares who say the internet has been essential in the past year among those with a bachelor’s degree or more formal education, adults under 30, and those 65 and older.

A large majority of Americans (81%) also say they talked with others via video calls at some point since the pandemic’s onset. And for 40% of Americans, digital tools have taken on new relevance: They report they used technology or the internet in ways that were new or different to them. Some also sought upgrades to their service as the pandemic unfolded: 29% of broadband users did something to improve the speed, reliability or quality of their high-speed internet connection at home since the beginning of the outbreak.

Still, tech use has not been an unmitigated boon for everyone. “ Zoom fatigue ” was widely speculated to be a problem in the pandemic, and some Americans report related experiences in the new survey: 40% of those who have ever talked with others via video calls since the beginning of the pandemic say they have felt worn out or fatigued often or sometimes by the time they spend on them. Moreover, changes in screen time occurred for Americans generally and for parents of young children . The survey finds that a third of all adults say they tried to cut back on time spent on their smartphone or the internet at some point during the pandemic. In addition, 72% of parents of children in grades K-12 say their kids are spending more time on screens compared with before the outbreak. 1

For many, digital interactions could only do so much as a stand-in for in-person communication. About two-thirds of Americans (68%) say the interactions they would have had in person, but instead had online or over the phone, have generally been useful – but not a replacement for in-person contact. Another 15% say these tools haven’t been of much use in their interactions. Still, 17% report that these digital interactions have been just as good as in-person contact.

About two-thirds say digital interactions have been useful, but not a replacement for in-person contact

Some types of technology have been more helpful than others for Americans. For example, 44% say text messages or group messaging apps have helped them a lot to stay connected with family and friends, 38% say the same about voice calls and 30% say this about video calls. Smaller shares say social media sites (20%) and email (19%) have helped them in this way.

The survey offers a snapshot of Americans’ lives just over one year into the pandemic as they reflected back on what had happened. It is important to note the findings were gathered in April 2021, just before all U.S. adults became eligible for coronavirus vaccine s. At the time, some states were beginning to loosen restrictions on businesses and social encounters. This survey also was fielded before the delta variant became prominent in the United States, raising concerns about new and evolving variants .

Here are some of the key takeaways from the survey.

Americans’ tech experiences in the pandemic are linked to digital divides, tech readiness

Some Americans’ experiences with technology haven’t been smooth or easy during the pandemic. The digital divides related to internet use and affordability were highlighted by the pandemic and also emerged in new ways as life moved online.

Beyond that, affordability remained a persistent concern for a portion of digital tech users as the pandemic continued – about a quarter of home broadband users (26%) and smartphone owners (24%) said in the April 2021 survey that they worried a lot or some about paying their internet and cellphone bills over the next few months.

From parents of children facing the “ homework gap ” to Americans struggling to afford home internet , those with lower incomes have been particularly likely to struggle. At the same time, some of those with higher incomes have been affected as well.

60% of broadband users with lower incomes often or sometimes have connection problems, and 46% are worried at least some about paying for broadband

Affordability and connection problems have hit broadband users with lower incomes especially hard. Nearly half of broadband users with lower incomes, and about a quarter of those with midrange incomes, say that as of April they were at least somewhat worried about paying their internet bill over the next few months. 3 And home broadband users with lower incomes are roughly 20 points more likely to say they often or sometimes experience problems with their connection than those with relatively high incomes. Still, 55% of those with lower incomes say the internet has been essential to them personally in the pandemic.

At the same time, Americans’ levels of formal education are associated with their experiences turning to tech during the pandemic.

Adults with a bachelor’s, advanced degree more likely than others to make daily video calls, use tech in new ways, consider internet essential amid COVID-19

Those with a bachelor’s or advanced degree are about twice as likely as those with a high school diploma or less formal education to have used tech in new or different ways during the pandemic. There is also roughly a 20 percentage point gap between these two groups in the shares who have made video calls about once a day or more often and who say these calls have helped at least a little to stay connected with family and friends. And 71% of those with a bachelor’s degree or more education say the internet has been essential, compared with 45% of those with a high school diploma or less.

More broadly, not all Americans believe they have key tech skills. In this survey, about a quarter of adults (26%) say they usually need someone else’s help to set up or show them how to use a new computer, smartphone or other electronic device. And one-in-ten report they have little to no confidence in their ability to use these types of devices to do the things they need to do online. This report refers to those who say they experience either or both of these issues as having “lower tech readiness.” Some 30% of adults fall in this category. (A full description of how this group was identified can be found in Chapter 3. )

‘Tech readiness,’ which is tied to people’s confident and independent use of devices, varies by age

These struggles are particularly acute for older adults, some of whom have had to learn new tech skills over the course of the pandemic. Roughly two-thirds of adults 75 and older fall into the group having lower tech readiness – that is, they either have little or no confidence in their ability to use their devices, or generally need help setting up and learning how to use new devices. Some 54% of Americans ages 65 to 74 are also in this group.

Americans with lower tech readiness have had different experiences with technology during the pandemic. While 82% of the Americans with lower tech readiness say the internet has been at least important to them personally during the pandemic, they are less likely than those with higher tech readiness to say the internet has been essential (39% vs. 66%). Some 21% of those with lower tech readiness say digital interactions haven’t been of much use in standing in for in-person contact, compared with 12% of those with higher tech readiness.

46% of parents with lower incomes whose children faced school closures say their children had at least one problem related to the ‘homework gap’

As school moved online for many families, parents and their children experienced profound changes. Fully 93% of parents with K-12 children at home say these children had some online instruction during the pandemic. Among these parents, 62% report that online learning has gone very or somewhat well, and 70% say it has been very or somewhat easy for them to help their children use technology for online instruction.

Still, 30% of the parents whose children have had online instruction during the pandemic say it has been very or somewhat difficult for them to help their children use technology or the internet for this.

Remote learning has been widespread during the pandemic, but children from lower-income households have been particularly likely to face ‘homework gap’

The survey also shows that children from households with lower incomes who faced school closures in the pandemic have been especially likely to encounter tech-related obstacles in completing their schoolwork – a phenomenon contributing to the “ homework gap .”

Overall, about a third (34%) of all parents whose children’s schools closed at some point say their children have encountered at least one of the tech-related issues we asked about amid COVID-19: having to do schoolwork on a cellphone, being unable to complete schoolwork because of lack of computer access at home, or having to use public Wi-Fi to finish schoolwork because there was no reliable connection at home.

This share is higher among parents with lower incomes whose children’s schools closed. Nearly half (46%) say their children have faced at least one of these issues. Some with higher incomes were affected as well – about three-in-ten (31%) of these parents with midrange incomes say their children faced one or more of these issues, as do about one-in-five of these parents with higher household incomes.

More parents say their screen time rules have become less strict under pandemic than say they’ve become more strict

Prior Center work has documented this “ homework gap ” in other contexts – both before the coronavirus outbreak and near the beginning of the pandemic . In April 2020, for example, parents with lower incomes were particularly likely to think their children would face these struggles amid the outbreak.

Besides issues related to remote schooling, other changes were afoot in families as the pandemic forced many families to shelter in place. For instance, parents’ estimates of their children’s screen time – and family rules around this – changed in some homes. About seven-in-ten parents with children in kindergarten through 12th grade (72%) say their children were spending more time on screens as of the April survey compared with before the outbreak. Some 39% of parents with school-age children say they have become less strict about screen time rules during the outbreak. About one-in-five (18%) say they have become more strict, while 43% have kept screen time rules about the same.

More adults now favor the idea that schools should provide digital technology to all students during the pandemic than did in April 2020

Americans’ tech struggles related to digital divides gained attention from policymakers and news organizations as the pandemic progressed.

On some policy issues, public attitudes changed over the course of the outbreak – for example, views on what K-12 schools should provide to students shifted. Some 49% now say K-12 schools have a responsibility to provide all students with laptop or tablet computers in order to help them complete their schoolwork during the pandemic, up 12 percentage points from a year ago.

Growing shares across political parties say K-12 schools should give all students computers amid COVID-19

The shares of those who say so have increased for both major political parties over the past year: This view shifted 15 points for Republicans and those who lean toward the GOP, and there was a 9-point increase for Democrats and Democratic leaners.

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say the government has this responsibility, and within the Republican Party, those with lower incomes are more likely to say this than their counterparts earning more money.

Video calls and conferencing have been part of everyday life

Americans’ own words provide insight into exactly how their lives changed amid COVID-19. When asked to describe the new or different ways they had used technology, some Americans mention video calls and conferencing facilitating a variety of virtual interactions – including attending events like weddings, family holidays and funerals or transforming where and how they worked. 5 From family calls, shopping for groceries and placing takeout orders online to having telehealth visits with medical professionals or participating in online learning activities, some aspects of life have been virtually transformed:

“I’ve gone from not even knowing remote programs like Zoom even existed, to using them nearly every day.” – Man, 54

“[I’ve been] h andling … deaths of family and friends remotely, attending and sharing classical music concerts and recitals with other professionals, viewing [my] own church services and Bible classes, shopping. … Basically, [the internet has been] a lifeline.” – Woman, 69

“I … use Zoom for church youth activities. [I] use Zoom for meetings. I order groceries and takeout food online. We arranged for a ‘digital reception’ for my daughter’s wedding as well as live streaming the event.” – Woman, 44

Among those who have used video calls during the outbreak, 40% feel fatigued or worn out at least sometimes from time spent on these calls

When asked about video calls specifically, half of Americans report they have talked with others in this way at least once a week since the beginning of the outbreak; one-in-five have used these platforms daily. But how often people have experienced this type of digital connectedness varies by age. For example, about a quarter of adults ages 18 to 49 (27%) say they have connected with others on video calls about once a day or more often, compared with 16% of those 50 to 64 and just 7% of those 65 and older.

Even as video technology became a part of life for users, many accounts of burnout surfaced and some speculated that “Zoom fatigue” was setting in as Americans grew weary of this type of screen time. The survey finds that some 40% of those who participated in video calls since the beginning of the pandemic – a third of all Americans – say they feel worn out or fatigued often or sometimes from the time they spend on video calls. About three-quarters of those who have been on these calls several times a day in the pandemic say this.

Fatigue is not limited to frequent users, however: For example, about a third (34%) of those who have made video calls about once a week say they feel worn out at least sometimes.

These are among the main findings from the survey. Other key results include:

Some Americans’ personal lives and social relationships have changed during the pandemic: Some 36% of Americans say their own personal lives changed in a major way as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. Another 47% say their personal lives changed, but only a little bit. About half (52%) of those who say major change has occurred in their personal lives due to the pandemic also say they have used tech in new ways, compared with about four-in-ten (38%) of those whose personal lives changed a little bit and roughly one-in-five (19%) of those who say their personal lives stayed about the same.

Even as tech helped some to stay connected, a quarter of Americans say they feel less close to close family members now compared with before the pandemic, and about four-in-ten (38%) say the same about friends they know well. Roughly half (53%) say this about casual acquaintances.

The majority of those who tried to sign up for vaccine appointments in the first part of the year went online to do so: Despite early problems with vaccine rollout and online registration systems , in the April survey tech problems did not appear to be major struggles for most adults who had tried to sign up online for COVID-19 vaccines. The survey explored Americans’ experiences getting these vaccine appointments and reveals that in April 57% of adults had tried to sign themselves up and 25% had tried to sign someone else up. Fully 78% of those who tried to sign themselves up and 87% of those who tried to sign others up were online registrants.

When it comes to difficulties with the online vaccine signup process, 29% of those who had tried to sign up online – 13% of all Americans – say it was very or somewhat difficult to sign themselves up for vaccines at that time. Among five reasons for this that the survey asked about, the most common major reason was lack of available appointments, rather than tech-related problems. Adults 65 and older who tried to sign themselves up for the vaccine online were the most likely age group to experience at least some difficulty when they tried to get a vaccine appointment.

Tech struggles and usefulness alike vary by race and ethnicity. Americans’ experiences also have varied across racial and ethnic groups. For example, Black Americans are more likely than White or Hispanic adults to meet the criteria for having “lower tech readiness.” 6 Among broadband users, Black and Hispanic adults were also more likely than White adults to be worried about paying their bills for their high-speed internet access at home as of April, though the share of Hispanic Americans who say this declined sharply since April 2020. And a majority of Black and Hispanic broadband users say they at least sometimes have experienced problems with their internet connection.

Still, Black adults and Hispanic adults are more likely than White adults to say various technologies – text messages, voice calls, video calls, social media sites and email – have helped them a lot to stay connected with family and friends amid the pandemic.

Tech has helped some adults under 30 to connect with friends, but tech fatigue also set in for some. Only about one-in-five adults ages 18 to 29 say they feel closer to friends they know well compared with before the pandemic. This share is twice as high as that among adults 50 and older. Adults under 30 are also more likely than any other age group to say social media sites have helped a lot in staying connected with family and friends (30% say so), and about four-in-ten of those ages 18 to 29 say this about video calls.

Screen time affected some negatively, however. About six-in-ten adults under 30 (57%) who have ever made video calls in the pandemic say they at least sometimes feel worn out or fatigued from spending time on video calls, and about half (49%) of young adults say they have tried to cut back on time spent on the internet or their smartphone.

Throughout this report, “parents” refers to those who said they were the parent or guardian of any children who were enrolled in elementary, middle or high school and who lived in their household at the time of the survey. ↩
People with a high-speed internet connection at home also are referred to as “home broadband users” or “broadband users” throughout this report. ↩
Family incomes are based on 2019 earnings and adjusted for differences in purchasing power by geographic region and for household sizes. Middle income is defined here as two-thirds to double the median annual family income for all panelists on the American Trends Panel. Lower income falls below that range; upper income falls above it. ↩
A separate Center study also fielded in April 2021 asked Americans what the government is responsible for on a number of topics, but did not mention the coronavirus outbreak. Some 43% of Americans said in that survey that the federal government has a responsibility to provide high-speed internet for all Americans. This was a significant increase from 2019, the last time the Center had asked that more general question, when 28% said the same. ↩
Quotations in this report may have been lightly edited for grammar, spelling and clarity. ↩
There were not enough Asian American respondents in the sample to be broken out into a separate analysis. As always, their responses are incorporated into the general population figures throughout this report. ↩

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Table of contents, 34% of lower-income home broadband users have had trouble paying for their service amid covid-19, experts say the ‘new normal’ in 2025 will be far more tech-driven, presenting more big challenges, what we’ve learned about americans’ views of technology during the time of covid-19, key findings about americans’ views on covid-19 contact tracing, how americans see digital privacy issues amid the covid-19 outbreak, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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Securing Cyberspace: Crafting Tomorrow’s Internet Privacy Laws

This essay about the evolution of internet privacy legislation, delving into the intricate balance between technological innovation and regulatory intervention. It highlights the collaborative efforts of policymakers, technologists, and advocates in crafting robust legal frameworks to safeguard personal privacy in the digital age. Emphasizing the fundamental importance of privacy rights, the essay explores the challenges posed by globalization and the need for international cooperation in harmonizing legal standards. Ultimately, it underscores the necessity of upholding privacy as a fundamental human right while fostering an environment conducive to technological progress and innovation.

How it works

In an era where digital footprints shape our daily lives, the quest to safeguard personal privacy in the vast expanse of the internet has become more critical than ever before. Transitioning from the pixels that construct our online world to the intricate policies governing its boundaries signifies a pivotal juncture in the evolution of digital governance. As we navigate through this landscape of data, the formulation of robust internet privacy legislation emerges as a beacon of protection against the perils of unchecked digital surveillance and exploitation.

The journey towards effective internet privacy legislation is akin to a symphony of diverse voices harmonizing to compose a framework that encapsulates the essence of privacy in the digital age. From policymakers and legal scholars to technologists and civil society advocates, each contributes a unique perspective, enriching the discourse and shaping the contours of regulatory intervention. At its heart lies the recognition that privacy is not merely a commodity to be traded but a fundamental human right essential for preserving dignity, autonomy, and freedom in the digital sphere.

Central to the endeavor of crafting internet privacy laws is the delicate interplay between innovation and regulation, akin to a dance between progress and protection. As technological advancements continue to redefine the boundaries of what is possible, lawmakers are tasked with the formidable challenge of calibrating legal frameworks to accommodate the dynamic nature of digital transformation. Balancing the imperatives of innovation with the imperatives of privacy requires foresight, adaptability, and a commitment to fostering an ecosystem where technological progress is not at odds with individual rights.

Furthermore, in an increasingly interconnected world, the need for international cooperation and harmonization of legal standards cannot be overstated. The internet knows no borders, and as such, the fragmentation of regulatory regimes poses a significant barrier to effective privacy protection. By forging alliances across nations and aligning legislative efforts with global norms, policymakers can create a cohesive framework that transcends geographical boundaries and ensures consistent safeguards for privacy rights worldwide.

In conclusion, the journey from pixels to policies symbolizes a collective endeavor to chart the course of digital governance in the 21st century. As we navigate the complexities of cyberspace, let us not forget that the true measure of our success lies not in the sophistication of our technologies but in our ability to uphold the principles of privacy, transparency, and accountability that underpin a democratic society. Only by working together can we build a future where the promise of the internet is fulfilled without sacrificing the rights and freedoms of its users.

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How Copyright May Destroy Our Access To The World’s Academic Knowledge

from the we're-destroying-our-knowledge dept

The shift from analogue to digital has had a massive impact on most aspects of life. One area where that shift has the potential for huge benefits is in the world of academic publishing. Academic papers are costly to publish and distribute on paper, but in a digital format they can be shared globally for almost no cost. That’s one of the driving forces behind the open access movement. But as Walled Culture has reported, resistance from the traditional publishing world has slowed the shift to open access, and undercut the benefits that could flow from it.

That in itself is bad news, but new research from Martin Paul Eve ( available as open access ) shows that the way the shift to digital has been managed by publishers brings with it a new problem. For all their flaws, analogue publications have the great virtue that they are durable: once a library has a copy, it is likely to be available for decades, if not centuries. Digital scholarly articles come with no such guarantee. The Internet is constantly in flux, with many publishers and sites closing down each year, often without notice. That’s a problem when sites holding archival copies of scholarly articles vanish, making it harder, perhaps impossible, to access important papers. Eve explored whether publishers were placing copies of the articles they published in key archives. Ideally, digital papers would be available in multiple archives to ensure resilience, but the reality is that very few publishers did this. Ars Technica has a good summary of Eve’s results :

When Eve broke down the results by publisher, less than 1 percent of the 204 publishers had put the majority of their content into multiple archives. (The cutoff was 75 percent of their content in three or more archives.) Fewer than 10 percent had put more than half their content in at least two archives. And a full third seemed to be doing no organized archiving at all. At the individual publication level, under 60 percent were present in at least one archive, and over a quarter didn’t appear to be in any of the archives at all. (Another 14 percent were published too recently to have been archived or had incomplete records.)

This very patchy coverage is concerning, for reasons outlined by Ars Technica:

The risk here is that, ultimately, we may lose access to some academic research. As Eve phrases it, knowledge gets expanded because we’re able to build upon a foundation of facts that we can trace back through a chain of references. If we start losing those links, then the foundation gets shakier. Archiving comes with its own set of challenges: It costs money, it has to be organized, consistent means of accessing the archived material need to be established, and so on.

Given the importance of ensuring the long-term availability of academic research the manifest failure of most publishers to guarantee that by putting articles in multiple archives is troubling. What makes things worse is that there is an easy way to improve the resilience of the academic research system. If all papers could be shared freely, there could be many new archives located around the world holding the contents of all academic journals. One or two such archives already exist, for example the well-established Sci-Hub , and the more recent Anna’s Archive , which currently claims to hold around 100,000,000 papers.

Despite the evident value to the academic world and society in general of such multiple, independent backups, traditional publishing houses are pursuing them in the courts, in an attempt to shut them down. It seems that preserving their intellectual monopoly is more important to publishers than preserving the world’s accumulated academic knowledge. It’s a further sign of copyright’s twisted values that those archives offering solutions to the failure of publishers to fulfil their obligations to learning are regarded not as public benefactors, but as public enemies.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky . Originally posted to Walled Culture .

Filed Under: academic knowledge , archives , copyright , libraries

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Comments on “How Copyright May Destroy Our Access To The World’s Academic Knowledge”

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Conference papers are even worse

I’ve noticed a real issue with academic conference papers. Journals at least pretend to have a plan for the future, but conferences are a lot more uneven. A lot of conference websites aren’t kept up forever.

Some of the papers I worked on don’t exist on conference websites anymore; there’s at least one paper from several years ago that I don’t have a copy of. I really wish EasyChair would partner with arXiv or something.

Given how much research is verified as repeatable (IE “not much”), there can be serious questions about the validity of a lot of papers, especially (but not exclusively) in the soft sciences.

One can only hope that these archives being talked about have robust search mechanisms. Searching through 100 million research papers, to find the one that discussed the precise thing you wanted to know about, is not a thing to be done by hand within a lifetime.

… and that’s just so far. Consider what the situation will be in another 70 years!

Consider what the situation will be in another 70 years!

Would that be the 70 years after life?

Corporations have decided that EVERYTHING should be made into a subscription service. Time to start opting out. If we all revert to shopping locally and paying in cash, it will monkey wrench their plan. Also, build your own archives instead of paying for (limited) access to theirs, and stop trading your data for nominal discounts. We can control SOME of what we do, if we plan properly.

There’s a related issue that’s been bugging me for over a decade now, something mostly only concerning to footnote-geeks though–references/citations that rely more and more on URLs that won’t be around all that long. Yeah, who reads books anymore? Who looks at footnotes? which for a long time have morphed into cheaper but really irksome endnotes? Maybe I’m too fucking old but it’s damn near tragic that this is happening.

This is a big deal. Citations/footnotes/references are the glue that holds this knowledge together. And unfortunately it’s weak glue (in many cases) because of its reliance on transient domains, hosts, systems, and organizations. What we need is a method that’s impervious to those kinds of changes, so that we can decouple the ideas of “referenced paper” and “URL”.

Easy. Just do what I do and type the title of the paper into a search engine. In many cases, even where the paper was published by a company charging for access, I’ve found the prepublished version on a university website.

If your objective is to ensure access to science then yes, this is a problem, but when an archive or publishing house dies what a capitalist will do is look at this and say that it’s a future opportunity to charge both copyright licensing fees and additional publishing fees. This is something that could be extremely profitable for the ruling class, thus there is no incentive for the government to fix it.

This is a failure of academic libraries and librarians

This could all have been nipped in the bud 2 decades ago, but academic librarians were too excited by the prospect of instant, broad access to demand sensible contracts that provided either a hard copy of all journals, and/or a backup download of all articles.

In fact, if they would work together, they could do this right now. Meanwhile, access from Elsevier and other bullshit middlemen increases WAY faster than inflation, so that an academic library that doesn’t get a 10% increase in their collections budget (and none of them do) are in effect getting a budget cut. This has also been true for decades.

Sadly, librarians are not forward-thinking. I know, because I was one of the few voices pushing for more-than-temporary access to journals 2 decades ago, and the profession as a whole didn’t care.

/former librarian

This is a failure of US government and its regulatory capture.

Copyright is already destroying our access at all times, just not evenly. If copyright stops you from accessing something, it’s effectively lost media for you, even if it still technically exists for somebody else.

How Copyright May Destroy Our Access To The World’s Academic Knowledge

And if I publish a paper under diamond open access, how would the fact that I have a copyright on that paper destroy access to the knowledge in it? Please stop being hyperbolic, it only leads to maximalists screaming for worse laws, as we’ve seen with the MAFIAA wanting to bring back SOPA.

It also has the effect of blaming tools for the misuse people make of them. If someone beats someone else to death with a hammer, nobody screams for all hammers to be taken off the market, leaving people without the ability to pound in a nail, but sales may be restricted to prevent future misuse.

The bigger picture - longevity

Some years ago I was at a meeting where the issue of electronic data longevity was the issue. Physical media, rock carvings, clay tablets, papyrus, vellum, and even paper, last a long time, remain human readable without technology, and fragments are readable, even, as we recently saw, extracting words from charred scrolls at Pompeii, with advanced AI and scanning techniques.

Digital files are not so readable. File formats come and go, bit rot in storage media, and obsolete hardware, all conspire to “disappear” electronic information in a startlingly short period. Distributed access is one thing that increases redundancy against loss, but the ephemeral nature of the information and its storage, conflicts with this means of preserving information. Even if we had government storage archives of electronic data, equivalent to the Library of Congress for physically published media, would these data centers be useful a century, or a millennium into the future?

The Library at Alexandria proved a nearly single point of failure. But suppose all scrolls had been electronically converted and dispersed to many places, would any of those storage media survive and be readable in any way today?

We may well be enabling an “information dark age” for the future.

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April 14, 2024 • 46:17 The Sunday Read: ‘What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise’
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April 18, 2024 issue

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A Strange Life: Selected Essays of Louisa May Alcott

“I write for myself and strangers,” Gertrude Stein once announced. So, too, Louisa May Alcott, who wrote for herself as well as the strangers who have been reading Little Women since 1868, when it first appeared. For more than a century and a half, Little Women has inspired playwrights, composers, filmmakers, scholars, novelists, and of course countless young girls. Jane Smiley salutes those young girls—she was one of them—in her warmly appreciative preface to A Strange Life , Liz Rosenberg’s slim new collection of Alcott’s essays.

When she first encountered Little Women , Smiley realized that a book about girls was actually famous and that every library had it. Later it even seemed that the book had to be about Alcott’s own life. And since many others have felt the same way—with good reason—it’s not surprising that new biographies come down the pike every few years, intent on changing the negative view of Alcott best expressed by Henry James, who belittled her as “the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the school-room.”

Martha Saxton’s feminist Louisa May: A Modern Biography (1977) and, more recently, biographies by Harriet Reisen, Susan Cheever, and Eve LaPlante, and by scholars such as John Matteson, have demonstrated that Alcott was much more than the author of what she self-deprecatingly called “moral pap for the young.” Rather, as a woman of imagination with considerable stylistic range, Alcott composed gothic tales, short stories, satires, fantasies, adult novels, poetry, memoirs, and essays in which she wrote of female independence and its costs in a restrictive domestic circle. She was also a prolific letter writer who converted into a tart prose style much of her anguish—and anger—at the circumstances in which she found herself, as a woman, as a dutiful daughter, as a second-class citizen, and, ironically, as a best-selling author who worked hard to maintain her popularity.

Rosenberg, the author of Scribbles, Sorrows, and Russet Leather Boots: The Life of Louisa May Alcott (2021), aimed at young readers, is thus not the first person to suggest that Alcott, and in particular her nonfiction, are worthy of serious attention. There’s also Elaine Showalter’s excellent selection of Alcott’s prose in Alternative Alcott (1988); there’s the Portable Louisa May Alcott (2000), edited by Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, and The Sketches of Louisa May Alcott (2001), collected by the Alcott specialist Gregory Eiselein, not to mention the superb selection of her nonfiction in one of the Alcott volumes published by the Library of America.

In A Strange Life , Rosenberg wisely includes Alcott’s best-known prose works—the excellent, slightly fictionalized memoir “Transcendental Wild Oats” and the exceptional (abridged) Hospital Sketches —and sets them alongside excerpts from her semiautobiographical nonfiction to show that her prose, as she explains in her introduction, “canters along; she covers great distances in the fewest words; there is no dilly-dallying.” Maybe so; what’s also true is that Alcott can write with unmistakable acerbity.

Rosenberg provides some biographical information on Alcott as well but unfortunately doesn’t explain why she chose certain pieces and not others, or why she arranged them in the order she did. Presumably the essay “Happy Women” (1868), her penultimate selection, is meant to present Alcott at her feminist best. True, it was written as a buck-me-up advice column for the unmarried woman, counseling her not to fear becoming an “old maid” since “the loss of liberty, happiness, and self respect is poorly repaid by the barren honor of being called ‘Mrs.’” In stock terms, Alcott advises, “Be true to yourselves; cherish whatever talent you possess, and in using it faithfully for the good of others, you will most assuredly find happiness for yourself.” But pieces that Rosenberg didn’t include, such as “Unofficial Incidents Overlooked by the Reporters” (1875), Alcott’s account of the centennial celebration in Concord, Massachusetts, have far more bite:

We had no place in the procession, but such women as wished to hear the oration were directed to meet in the Town Hall at half-past nine, and wait there until certain persons, detailed for the service, should come to lead them to the tent, where a limited number of seats had been reserved for the weaker vessels.

Rosenberg also reprints short excerpts from Alcott’s travel book, Shawl-Straps : An Account of a Trip to Europe (1872), but these selections—from the essays “Women of Brittany,” “The Flood in Rome,” and “Visit from a King”—are flat and predictable. And while she includes Alcott’s autobiographical sketch “My Boys,” a forgettable group of portraits intended mainly for young people and originally published in Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (1872), Rosenberg fails to note that this was the first in a series of six Scrap-Bag books ( Shawl-Straps being the first), and that in them Alcott cleverly assumed the voice of Jo March Bhaer, from the best-selling Little Women —presumably to make money.

Despite the thinness of these sketches, they could be enriched if the reader knew the books from which they’re taken or more of the circumstances under which they were written. For Alcott worked obsessively to become a successful writer and, not coincidentally, her impoverished family’s breadwinner. Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was eccentric and impecunious—and lovable, as long as you weren’t related to him. A self-taught Connecticut peddler turned educator, Bronson for a time ran the progressive Temple School in Boston. But after he published Conversations with Children on the Gospels (1836–1837), in which he included allusions to sex and birth, scandalized Bostonians withdrew their children from the school, forcing it to close. His next venture was short-lived; he admitted a Black child to a new school and even his die-hard supporters bolted.

Then in 1843, when Louisa was ten, Bronson marched his family off to the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, about fourteen miles from Concord, where the Alcotts had been living. At a farm inappropriately dubbed Fruitlands, Bronson believed that they and a small band of cohorts could create a new Garden of Eden by living off the fruit of the land. “Insane, well-meaning egotists,” the antislavery writer Lydia Maria Child called them.

At Fruitlands, Abigail May Alcott, Louisa’s mother, was tasked with the cleaning, the washing of clothes, and the cooking, though there was little of that since utopia mandated a diet of mostly raw vegetables. (Rosenberg calls Bronson “a prescient and intelligent vegetarian pre-hippie.”) She was miserable, and the children almost starved. The model for the beloved Marmee, the mother of the brood in Little Women , Abigail was the youngest child in a family of prominent Boston Brahmin liberals; her brother was the passionate Unitarian abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Samuel Joseph May. She studied French, Latin, and chemistry privately in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and later helped form the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. In 1830 she married the self-involved Bronson, who confessed in his journal, “I love her because she loves me.” In Little Women , Marmee understandably declares, “I am angry nearly every day of my life.”

In “Transcendental Wild Oats” (1873), Alcott changes the names of the Fruitlanders and, Rosenberg argues, “alternates broad comedy with tragedy.” As she puts it, “Alcott never lingers on the psychological devastation” that she likely experienced but rather

focuses on the characters around her and records the homely details of daily life (“unleavened bread, porridge, and water for breakfast; bread, vegetables, and water for dinner; bread, fruit, and water for supper”), leaving little room for disbelief.

Yet Alcott’s details are telling. Her irony is unmistakable, and her voice devastating in its affectlessness. As she observes, these “modern pilgrims,” most notably her father, possessed “the firm belief that plenteous orchards were soon to be evoked from their inner consciousness.” Once in their prospective Eden, she acidly continues, “no teapot profaned that sacred stove, no gory steak cried aloud for vengeance from her chaste gridiron; and only a brave woman’s taste, time, and temper were sacrificed on that domestic altar.” Fortunately the sojourn in paradise lasted only seven months.

The Alcotts eventually resettled in Concord, where Louisa grew up near Emerson, Thoreau, and later Hawthorne. But since “money is never plentiful in a philosopher’s house,” as she later recollected, the family temporarily moved to a basement apartment in Boston. After her mother formed what was basically a female employment agency, Louisa volunteered to take a position as a lady’s live-in companion in Dedham, Massachusetts. It turned out to be a degrading experience that she partly fictionalized in the essay “How I Went Out to Service” (1874), with which Rosenberg opens her volume, claiming it’s yet another example of Alcott’s ability to “strike the intersecting point between tragedy and comedy.” It’s a fine essay but not particularly comic: it’s a chilly story of exploitation and sexual harassment despite the moralizing conclusion about how the experience taught her many lessons.

Doubtless it did, but it also seems that Alcott wrote more for strangers than herself, often muzzling the intensity of her response to those who underestimated, harassed, or took advantage of her. She had begun to sell stories to help support her family, and though she’d already published two in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly , she also tried her hand at teaching again, despite her hatred of it. The publisher of The Atlantic , James Fields, loaned her forty dollars to help outfit her classroom, but when she came to him with another story—according to Rosenberg, “How I Went Out to Service”—he told her bluntly, “Stick to your teaching.” Rosenberg omits what happened later: after the success of Little Women , Alcott paid back the loan, telling Fields she’d found that writing paid far better than teaching, so she’d stick to her pen. “He laughed,” she said, “& owned that he made a mistake.”

She never forgot the insult. Like Marmee, who said she was angry nearly every day of her life, Alcott added, “I have learned not to show it.” Instead she found ways to stifle her rage, distancing herself from her feelings and retreating into the safety of platitudes, which often deaden her prose. For instance, at the conclusion of “How I Went Out to Service,” she tacks on a lesson about “making a companion, not a servant, of those whose aid I need, and helping to gild their honest wages with the sympathy and justice which can sweeten the humblest and lighten the hardest task.” It’s not clear if she’s counseling the reader or herself.

That’s far less true, though, in Hospital Sketches (1863), Alcott’s first successful book, in which she combined her recollections with material from the letters she wrote home while serving as an army nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, D.C. Having “corked up” her tears, she nonetheless writes with feeling about “the barren honors” that these soldiers, cut to pieces at Fredericksburg, had won. She washed their bodies with brown soap, dressed their wounds, sang them lullabies, mopped their brows, and scribbled letters to the mothers and sweethearts of the nameless men, some without arms or legs, who lay in excruciating pain in the hotel’s ballroom. Such “seeming carelessness of the value of life, the sanctity of death” astonished Alcott, who wanted to believe that none of them had been sacrificed in vain.

She lasted only six weeks before she fell ill with typhoid pneumonia and had to be taken home to Concord by her father. The physicians who treated her shaved her hair and dosed her with calomel, a mercury compound that ultimately ruined her health. Alcott, encouraged by a friend to publish her experience, wrote of the desperate conditions that had made her, like many others, so sick: the fetid water and poor ventilation and scant or inedible food. And she wrote not just of the clammy foreheads and agonized deaths, and the insouciance of doctors who made a young woman tell a desperate man that he was dying, but also of the inescapable racism even of her fellow nurses:

I expected to have to defend myself from accusations of prejudice against color; but was surprised to find things just the other way, and daily shocked some neighbor by treating the blacks as I did the whites. The men would swear at the “darkies,” would put two g s into negro, and scoff at the idea of any good coming from such trash. The nurses were willing to be served by the colored people, but seldom thanked them, never praised, and scarcely recognized them in the street.

When she voluntarily touched a small Black child, she was labeled a fanatic. Alcott then offers a typical homily:

Though a hospital is a rough school, its lessons are both stern and salutary; and the humblest of pupils there, in proportion to his faithfulness, learns a deeper faith in God and in himself.

These homilies, like her detachment, may have been a marketing strategy, since she worried always about hanging on to her audience. Yet she did still write for herself after all. “Darkness made visible,” as she called it, was what she also sought, anticipating, in her way, what the witty Emily Dickinson surmised: “Success in Circuit lies.”

The Corruption Playbook

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(DOC) Impact of the internet on our daily life
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Impact of INTERNET in our daily life
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Essay on Importance of Internet in 150, 200, 300 Words
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