Social Essay: Computers Then and Now

Bradley Craig
Ms. Weisberger
November 19, 2014


Social Essay: Computers Then and Now
How Social Networking has Changed the World

There has been numerous reports of online causing more problems than anyone can handle at one moment. On the other hand, there have also been numerous reports of the Internet helping students and adults alike. People often misunderstand the purpose of the Web, and insist that it is a undesirable weapon that should no longer be used. However, it will be shown that the Internet is not to blame for any of this. In fact, it makes for a speedy new way for people to communicate over vast distances and come up with ideas as a group without necessarily being in the same building.
The first subject I will discuss is how the lives of some teenagers are spent constantly hooked up to the Web. In the video 'Frontline: Growing Up Online' students, especially teenagers, are described as "constantly being hooked up to the Web" and the Web was described both negatively and positively, which is entirely understandable. However, things have changed since that video was created. Back then, XP was the dominant operating system for PCs (which is still the case) and the main phone of the age was the flip phone, and cellular data was the thing of science fiction. With the dawn of the smartphone era years in the past communication on social networks changed. Wether it is for the better or worse we may never know, but it has changed in a major way. People can now communicate off of Facebook literally at any time and PC computers are an antiquated technology. Safeguards are now as prominent as ever, yet cyberbullying has gone down dramatically. Now the only way you will find any sign of the dawn of the Social Networking era is if you were looking for it.
The second subject that I am going to describe is suicide rates caused by social networking. While this does remain a threat, and I am not going to put down how important it is that a child is not bullied to the point of committing suicide, there are worse ways that people have been massacred, and most of the prominent killings have nothing to do with social networking. In fact, they are mostly due to the unrest of the killer, not the victim. Also, of all the ways people are killed, suicide is one of the lowest. Furthermore, the social network can be used as a weapon, and I can say that the entire Internet is very dangerous, just like any major city is dangerous. However, the Internet can actually be a valuable communication resource if you know how to use it. And I have been using the Internet for many years, and nothing has happened to me so far because I didn't talk to anyone I don't already know, both in real life and on the Internet.
With these reasons, it is clear to see how the Internet is helpful and not harmful. True, bad thing can happen on the Web and I know this. However, with more and more people becoming educated about how to use the Web, these issues should decline, and the Internet will be used once again for what it was originally intended to be used for: finding and receiving information from anywhere in the world. People are more responsible about the Web now than they were in the past and I believe that they will continue to become more and more responsible as the Web matures and more and more people become educated about Internet safety. And with this massive decrease in instances of suicide or online societies, I firmly believe that more people will become comfortable with this relatively new way to communicate and will embrace it. It is already a commonality, and with the dawn of new Internet-using technologies such as VR, it won't be too long if people are able to communicate truly face-to-face with 3D holographic images. Will people embrace these new technologies in the same way that they embraced the idea of the Internet, which is, to say, not at all? Or will people look at it differently and accept it far quicker than they did with the Internet? Only time will tell.