The Internet :: essays research papers

Right now I'm thinking about the Internet, the all-pervasive medium through which I've published my thoughts and work I've done in my free time for several years now. Like mostly everyone else, I communicate with others using the Internet, play games through it, read news, and learn about things. (Except, sadly, I am not convinced the general public is interested in learning.) And we are all familiar with the "dot com mania" and the insane rise in the NASDAQ - and, sadly, the subsequent fall of the NASDAQ. People have been wondering exactly what was behind all of this, and if the Internet - which once seemed so enticing - is now bogus. "What we are entering is a power age, and the importance of the power age lies in its ability, rightly used with the wage motive behind it, to increase and cheapen production so that all of us may have more of this world's goods. The way to liberty, the way to equality of opportunity, the way from empty phrases to actualities, lies through power" - Henry Ford Here's something which should not be news: the entire .com insanity was a crock from the start! That's right - the entire New Economy was founded on delusions and misinformation all along. But just as people were overzealous then, they are overly pessimistic now (at the time of this writing). The Internet is not intrinsically a crock. But the general public got a taste of what the Internet can do, and warped and distorted it into a magical cure-all for all of life's problems. The Internet cannot produce material objects; only industry can. The Internet can near-instantaneously transport information from any location to any location, but it cannot transport atoms. And while information is fun and happy, many other things we enjoy (such as books (for now), pizza, and computers!) are made of heavy, sluggish atoms. Throwing up a web site does not automatically mean instant wealth, nor does a name that ends in ".com". This has always been true, and will continue to be true (for a while...), but for a short time most everyone deluded themselves into believing the exact opposite. And even technically knowledgeable people (such as myself, and many others who knew what the Internet was before everyone and his uncle came onto the scene) were caught up in the hysteria, because the Internet is indeed really cool, and it seemed it was the time when everyone was becoming aware of that fact too.