The internet represents a world without boundaries, a digital domain both removed from and parallel to our own, where information of any kind can be discovered, downloaded or mail-ordered, and every desire, carnal or platonic, and interest is catered to at the push of a button. From its Cold War origins to the internet boom of the nineties, the World Wide Web has also been feared by those who are ignorant to what the net can offer, or are well aware.
The web did not truly blossom until the mid-nineties, when phone line suppliers and broadband companies began to capitalise on the foreseeable phenomenon. Within but a decade the net has outgrown its initial techno-geek user base and is now an integral part of Western society. Arguably, what was once defined as cyber-culture no longer exists; the net has been embraced by mainstream society and beyond. With internet access steadily expanding into developing countries, and over 1 billion people using the internet worldwide, further growth is inevitable.
The obvious benefit of online communication is that of remote access; real time conversation, email, 24 hr banking, and online shopping being several examples. Cyberspace presents a form of global communication that operates regardless of time or place, restricted only to the accessibility of internet access points. Handheld technology, such as WAP mobile phones and wireless connections, has increased this access furthermore, and broadband also offers a form of communication in which the distance or period of communication does not affect the cost.
The Web has presented us with a comprehensible online library, a decentralised information resource that via internet search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, offers instant access to a vast amount of information. Increased bandwidth capacity has made access to digital media, such as Mp3s and video files, convenient and fast, and also brought about a certain preservation of digital information, a good example being ROM emulation, the copied images of retro video games that would no longer be available to the public outside of unauthorized distribution.
In the industrialised world, the Web has brought about the growth of a new form of journalism, and a freedom of speech unattainable through other mediums. The growth of weblogs/blogs, forums, newsletters and personal homepages has presented the user with an affordable way to voice their own concerns, views and interests. Unlike traditional magazines and newspapers, internet sites can survive without finances, and can present appeal to a niche market without marketing concerns. Online, every user can have their say; regardless of whether it is accurate, valid, or worth reading.
Withstanding the boom, and partial crash, of the dotcom enterprises of the late nineties, online shopping has broken numerous trading boundaries, and now provides the buyer with unlimited choices, regardless of location. Amazon provides search engines that are used to track rare books both new and old, and items such as international antiques and collectables can be tracked down with little effort. Mp3 albums and DVD quality video can purchasable and downloaded directly within the hour, eliminating postage costs and shipping times altogether. Though the large corporations arguably dominate the online market as they do the 'real world', smaller businesses and aspiring professionals have prospered from the low-cost advertising and small scale financing that the Web, and market-sites such as eBay, offer, and can effectively promote themselves alongside their conglomerate competitors by focussing on a specific market.
With this growth of online trading, companies are forever attempting new marketing methods. With many browsers now featuring automatic pop-up filters, the business world will test new ways to monitor potential clients. With companies finding new ways to monitor and exploiting search engines, user privacy is an increasing concern.
Despite this promise of communicational possibilities, the rift between the acceleration of access points in industrialised countries compared to that of developing countries is widening faster, with internet growth in the third world impeded by both financial and structural limitations, referred to as 'digital divide', an economic phenomenon that distinguishes developed from developing countries, where factors of geography, socio-economic status and ethnicity prove crucial.
Encouragingly, many developing countries are seeing the number of internet access points double each year, but another divide that looks less likely to close is the language barrier. With English the most requested language on the Web, and the majority of multilingual sites catering predominantly for the western languages, many minority languages have suffered online, impeded by the dominance of the Latin alphabet and QWERTY keyboard. Nevertheless, 35.6% of the world's internet users are based in Asia, with Chinese and Japanese being the second and third most frequent languages, respectively.
Unarguably the digital sceptic's greatest ammunition is the abundance of both easily accessible pornography and online crime. Porn is the Web's largest and most financially profitable industry, having flourished from the Web's lack of censorship and private nature, and the availability of sexually explicit sites to young children is a growing concern to many parents. Parental filters and adult verification filters are easily bypassed by computer literate youngsters. Though not technically illegal, many adult sites tread ambiguously, selling products and services from a country/state in which they are legal, to a consumer located where they are not.
Credit card fraud, privacy invasion and personal security are a constant concern to many internet users, with online criminals forever developing new ways to steal credit card details and bank information, despite the effectiveness of antivirus programs and firewalls. Scams such as 'phishing', in which the internet subscriber receives a seemingly legitimate email demanding their personal banking details, are increasing common.
Another widespread concern has been online piracy. With the music and film industries claiming to have lost billions from internet piracy, file sharing is a practice that has become increasingly commonplace despite the legal issues. The tension between protecting intellectual property and promoting creativity and the free flow of ideas is evident.
Whereas in the Western world there has been much debate over the benefits of a complete lack of censorship, in other regions such as the Middle East, the internet is considered a security threat by less democratic governments, and political and religious sites have been censored from the public by government controlled filters. With the People's Republic of China arresting individuals for accessing non-sanctioned websites, the antithesis of the Western attitude, one that is itself criticized for doing little to police the Web, where paedophilia and Nazism sites are rising. The net potentially allows those who would previously have be been observers to become participants.
All taken into account, it is easier to be sceptical than favourable. The greatest advantage that the Web has brought to the Western world, one that no number of concerns can detract from, is the level and range of free speech, globally decentralised and for the most part, unmonitored. This double-edged blade encompasses both the darkest depravity of the Web, and the broadening of democratic boundaries; for every opportunity online communication offers, exploitation is to be expected. Cyberspace offers a separate world that parallels our very own, for bettor or worse, and is all the more interesting because of it.
Carl Doherty created http://www.shelfabuse.com under supervision of his doctor, who conceived the criticism and categorisation of every film that Carl watches as a way of tackling his obsessive compulsive disorder. Carl has now watched 23 films, and is not entirely sure he liked any of them. Carl currently resides in Southend-on-Sea where he shares an abandoned warehouse with a buffy-tufted marmoset named Tautilus Samson. Together they have all sorts of adventures. He is currently completing his second non-fiction book How to Build a Quantum Flux Capacitor in 8 Easy Steps, the sequel to the bestselling Manipulating Time and Space on a Budget. Or maybe not.
Read more of Carl's comic, graphic novel, and film related features and new movie reviews at http://www.shelfabuse.com
