Chapter 2: Impact on the Society?

In your opinion, what media discovery or invention has made the greatest impact on society today? How and why?

Today's topic will be based on the above. From the video on social ice cream in Chapter 1, we knew that the media has a big influence in our daily life. For the easiest example, as technology develops, majority of the people can't survive without internet. The Internet allows us to involve in social network with just a few clicks (Facebook). Even we can survive without internet, we can't catch up what's the latest information or news in the world, or worse, we can't communicate with each other.

Lets take a look on other example as well. Technological change has made globalization a tangible reality. Since the end of World War II, the world has seen major advances in communication, information processing and transportation technology, including the explosive emergence of the Internet and World Wide Web. In 1990, fewer than 1 million users were connected to the Internet. By 1995, the figure had risen to 50 million. By December 2007, the Internet had 1.3 billion users. The rapid growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) has developed into the information backbone of the global world.

The WWW has made great impact on the world business today. Billions of goods and services were expected to be sold online to retail customers. Many people like to use internet to get information before making a purchase. They collected data and feedback of one product to avoid buying a bad quality product. Viewed globally, the Web is emerging as an equalizer between big firm and small firm. Since it rolls back some of the constraints of location, scale and time zones, the WWW makes it much easier for buyers and sellers to find each other, wherever they may be located and whatever their size. It allows business, both small and large to expand their business globally at a lower cost than ever before.

Besides that, the WWW also impact the education field greatly. Education today is slowly moving towards to techno-based. Textbooks do not have to be a must to students as the search engines such as Google, Yahoo enable students to locate information easily. Furthermore, E-learning is more interesting to students as the graphics were wonderful to look at. A topic that could be very dry can also be exciting to read by combining the content with animation. Students also can download the lecture notes and project sample through Internet even when they are not in school. Next, computers have also been a source of joy for children because of the games they like to play with them. So school work, that resembles play, is much more appealing. With the vast opportunities the WWW, affords great learning with much joy. That is why in Germany, the computers are taught from kindergarten.

Finally, another one of the impacts of the Internet and WWW on the society is in the field of medicine. People can seek from Internet to have a great source of information about certain disease. Hence, people are much better informed and eventually lead to an increase of health. Patients can easily contact the doctor to discuss their cases, understand alternatives and any other information using the Email services.

As a conclusion, the WWW has made the greatest impact on society today. No matter how it affected our culture and life in good and bad ways, it certain did change the way we work, how we spend our free time and also the way we communicate.