How The Internet Has Transformed Our Lives

Since the first Internet connections were laid in the late 1950s, the world has undergone profound changes due to the power of the World Wide Web. The Internet has turned our existence upside down. It has revolutionised communications, to the extent that it is now our preferred medium of everyday communication. In almost everything we do, we use the Internet. 

From the basic needs to the utmost luxuries, almost every facet of our lifestyle is now impacted by the Internet and dependence upon the Internet is only expected to grow more.

In 1989 a British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, submitted a proposal for a “distributed information system” at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland. A year later, the world’s first website and server went live at CERN.

Since then, the Internet has changed business, education, government, healthcare, and the ways in which we interact with our loved ones. It has become one of the key drivers of social evolution. Today, immense quantities of information are uploaded and downloaded over the internet and the content is our own, for now we are all commentators, publishers, and creators.

The changes in social communication are of particular significance and the Internet has removed all communication barriers.

The Internet itself has been transformed. In its early days, which from a historical perspective are still relatively recent, it was a static network designed to shuttle a small freight of bytes or a short message between two terminals; it was a repository of information where content was published and maintained only by expert coders. Not any more.

Here Are Ten Ways That The  Internet Has Transformed Our Lives

Search Engines: From AltaVista, which was launched in the mid 1990s and shut down in 2013, to Google, Yahoo, Baidu and Bing, search engines allow users to enter keywords and sift through billions of websites to find the information they need.
The number of queries being processed by search engines is huge and Google is the web’s number one website, with Baidu.com ranking fourth, according to rankings site Alexa, a subsidiary of Amazon.

E-Commerce: Websites such as Amazon, eBay and China’s Alibaba have helped hasten the transition from street shopping to making purchases from the comfort of your home. Today, with the click of a mouse or a simple voice command, a host of items, from oven gloves to groceries and computers to cell phones, can be ordered for home delivery, often on the same day.

Social Media: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn, Flickr… the list of social media sites people use is vast. In just a few years, these websites have become many people’s medium of choice for sharing their musings, photos, videos and a whole lot more. The scale of these organisations is impressive. For example at the end of 2019, Facebook alone had had 2.13 billion monthly active users and 25,105 employees.

Connected Homes: The Internet of Things (IoT) is starting to have an increasingly important influence over our homes. The European Commission describes the IoT as merging “physical and virtual worlds, creating smart environments.” More and more homes are also making use of ‘virtual assistants’ like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant and many other devices that are connected to the internet and able to “talk” to one another.

The Office: Today’s offices, with and without Covid lockdown, are a world away from the workplaces of 15 or 20 years ago. High-speed Internet connections mean that workers have almost instant access to the information they need to do their jobs, while video conference calls and presentations with colleagues on the other side of the world are commonplace. Furthermore, computers are used for a range of other tasks including sending emails, scheduling meetings and writing memos. In many industries, computers are used to carry out complicated and time-consuming tasks such as designing buildings and processing large amounts of data.

Love & Marriage: The Internet has helped revolutionise the way people look for and find love. Algorithms, rather than serendipity, are increasingly being used by people searching for “the one.” Whether this is a good thing or not is open for a debate. Traditionalists argue that the instantaneous nature of apps and websites devalues relationships.Some advocates of online dating say that, in an increasingly fragmented world, apps and websites make it easier to meet people.

Streaming: The use of DVDs, CDs and other physical media is in rapid decline as the streaming of film and music through TVs, tablets and smartphones has become increasingly popular. Netflix now has more than 100 million subscribers, while music streaming service Spotify has more than 144 million subscribers.

Email: Gone are the days when you would have to wait days, weeks or even months for a letter from a loved one, business partner or friend. Using email, people can compose a message and send it to their desired recipient in an instant, with billions of messages sent every single day. In the UK, 82 percent of adults sent or received emails in 2017. This made it the “most popular internet activity,” according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS).

Smartphones: Smartphones have become a crucial part of 21st century life. We use them to carry out a host of tasks, from making phone calls, streaming music and sending emails to watching entire films. Our hunger for these devices shows no sign of abating. According to analysis released by IHS Markit in 2017, there will be over 6 billion smartphones in use by 2020.

Online Banking: People all over the world can now make money transfers, pay bills and set up regular payments online. In the UK, the popularity of Internet banking is increasing, with 63 percent of adults using it in 2017, according to the ONS.
An EY report on UK Finance found that 19.6 million people in the UK made use of banking apps in 2018, with a staggering 159 logins per second.

Negative Effects

On the Internet, every piece of information can appear equally important. That important-looking information can make it difficult  to discriminate between information and disinformation. People can connect to negative information sources on the Internet just as easily as they they can connect to the positive. This has helped the emergence of fake news and producers of disinformation to spread lies, both knowingly and unknowingly, without the filter of personal analysis, critical intelligence or institutional judgment. 

The Internet's impact on society continues to make economic, social, and political changes around the globe. It’s obvious because the billions of users, communities, cultures using the Internet in their daily life.  Our collective actions, thoughts, and communication skills expressed through Internet are impacting society, both positively and negatively.

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