Quick communication (either online or off line) is good. The use of Internet in Education, Research and Development, E-Commerce, E-Governance, etc is also appreciable. Fears are its open and unrestricted contents to children. Also, some people become Internet addict reducing their productivity. Privacy and security of transactions are also some issues to be carefully looked upon. Among the expectations are speed of access, security of transactions, keeping undesirable contents away from children, etc.

I would add concerns related to social media, which now become a powerful tool of (mis)information distribution to, and (self)-organizing of, large masses of people.

Hi Ash,

Many thanks for your response to this question. The spread of the internet definitely has enormous benefits for us to day in the various sectors of society as you wrote. However, other sections of today's society fear that the prevalence of information sharing via the internet has made us 'distract able' we can hardly concentrate on anything for the time that might be required. Yet others argue that we are increasingly becoming 'anti social' through social media. It is alleged that the worst affected are children and the young people, who would rather spend time on social media website 'meeting friends' instead of interacting with those in their immediate vicinity such as family or friends. Some adults complain of their spouses spending huge amounts of time on electronic devices other than availing themselves time to nurture their relationships and things of the sort.

Alipov has hinted on the power of distributing information around whether it be true or false. We have read of stories where youngster have taken their own lives after cyber bullies have threatened to post their private images or videos on the internet for 'everyone' to see.

Now with the information spread still growing at this explosive rate, one wonders whether we might be headed for more 'joys' or 'disasters' .

Thank you

The Internet should be judged not only by its various internal parts and how well or dysfunctionally they operate on people directly, but also how the Internet interacts with other parts of the social framework, values, and goals, supporting both individual effort and socialization.

I would say that a prime achievement of the Internet has been to help one person find another person in the world to consult with in order to move closer to solving a problem of interest (this is a principle of RG) and to become acquainted online to broaden their respective worlds (e.g. through the institution of Meetups arranged by computer to meet with a group in person for an activity or discussion).

One of the main desirable properties of the World Wide Web, from the beginning, has been its inclusiveness. Consumer interest in using online resources via PC access began around 1979 with the establishment of the CompuServe service. In the early 1990s there were a series of competing proprietary online services for a few years. But some, like Prodigy, followed a strategy of requiring subscribing workstations to have powerful graphics and large memory requirements in order to attach to the server and process the communications. This was partly so that advertising images would have maximal effect in terms of resolution and speed – after all, the service was set up by a retailer (Sears) partnered with a computer/services company (IBM).

Then arrived the mass-access version of the World Wide Web in July 1994, which had the opposite values – almost every small, simple workstation could access the service, making inclusiveness a reality. The Web won out, and Prodigy went away. Yet advertising still found its path into the mix. AOL adjusted better than Prodigy, and managed to create a successful hybrid strategy of open and proprietary services because it focused on people-interrelationships, not on retailers, as its organizing principle. CompuServe had learned the same principle 15 years earlier – people want access to people. Later, Facebook and other social media dug far deeper into this desire and need, at first by simply sharing pictures of interest and value to family and friends. Note: I did related research into this people-factor in 1979-1985 as a PC market analyst/forecaster.

As a parallel, I would say that the automobile industry in 1900-1950 had many real dysfunctions – high levels of traffic accidents, pollution, the stress of congestion for commuters (taking time away from family life), greater opportunities for immoral behavior of all kinds, and using up valuable fossil fuels on less efficient transportation systems – yet its mobility and inclusiveness (simple driver’s license requirements) gave people access -- to explore, share, and socialize in a wider areas, helping, among other things, to sustain extended families. It also helped people find more accessible jobs.

In my view, the next frontier for the Internet will be its potential for increasing each individual’s Self-Knowledge by means of evolving special science-based software and self-managed personal-profile databases of various attributes, for many including genome. The theme will be Individual Differences. The generated knowledge will often lead people to seek and buy individually tailored consumer products, whether medical, social, learning, travel, or household.

Personal Science (Self-Knowledge of one’s Individual Differences) will have a major stimulating impact on science itself, spurring the creation of required individual-differences-oriented software and the basic research behind it – especially how different factors interact uniquely inside the person, as an ecology. This will take perhaps 40 years to fully evolve, but it starts now.