The Internet’s Light and Dark Sides In one way the Internet is a great thing, it allows us to communicate with others and fulfilled the promise of a video phone which had been talked about since I was a kid and hadn’t come to pass until the internet people figured out how to do it. This paved the way for the millions of cell phones to become video phones. I would have thought this would have become the communication of the future but I was fooled. The communication of the future has become the text message. It seems we have gone backwards in this respect. I know most people love it and you can drop a message anytime and don’t have to wait for someone to answer the phone so perhaps that is the reason, but I really don’t know. What I do know is I do not like text messaging. I don’t have the fingers for it and often hit more than one key and then have to delete. Another thing the internet has accomplished is allowing kids to interact with adults and this is not good. It is not good for many reasons and one of the big reasons is kids get seduced by predators. It has given predators a way to take advantage of kids and no matter how careful a parent is there is more danger now from predators than ever before. Young kids are naïve and many believe what is being told them. This allows predators another avenue. One of the worst crimes anyone can commit is a crime against a child whether is it sexual or otherwise. There is another side to children on the internet and it is they like to make believe they are adults and cause trouble. This has become very annoying and even where the rules state you have to be a certain age to get on to a social site for example, many parents let the kids go on anyway. When I was young there was only a few ways a hate monger could reach people. It was usually with a pamphlet or making a speech on a street corner and this only reached a small audience. One of the unfortunate sides of the internet is it allows access by anyone to millions of people. Some of the meanest people get the largest audiences. I don’t know if it is for entertainment or not but the stage they are on is huge. Now they can even reach the entire planet and with all that translation software out there even language is no barrier. Can you imagine if the internet was around when Hitler was coming to power he would have been able to reach tens of millions of sympathizers around the world. This would have been even a worse disaster. Then there are those who lie and spread all sorts of rumors and conspiracy theories. I have always said if you have no proof you shouldn’t make definitive statements about someone. This has not stopped these people from ruining some reputations. The way things are today if you say something bad about someone it can reach millions of people and it doesn’t have to be true to ruin them. Trying to get your reputation back can never work completely, there will always be those who will either not believe you even if you are innocent or if a retraction was posted never have read it. It is even worse if several people are convicted of something then you are accused of the same thing because people tend to believe these things after others have been found guilty of them. While the internet is fun it is not the best place to get reliable information. Technology has made it too easy to forge, or alter pictures, recordings and videos. You can’t trust anything you see or hear. It has also become a platform for those who want to exhibit their skills in special effects so they create videos of many different things and call them real hoping some film company will want to hire them for their skill. It is truly a shame because what this has accomplished is to destroy the validity of any video which has an actual event on it. When the airship, Hindenburg was filmed burning and crashing it was an incredible thing and we all knew it was something which actually happened. I saw a video of what was said to be a UFO exploding in the sky the other day and there was no way it could be believed without several witnesses who had excellent reputations testifying to it being an actual event they saw. Criminals have found a goldmine on the internet because there are so many ways they can steal your money and defraud companies. As far as defrauding companies, some companies have little or very weak protection of our data and this data is continuing to be stolen. Hackers are having a field day. When a company knows nothing will happen if it loses private individual data it has no incentive to protect it because that costs money. What I can’t understand is when companies have all your private data and you never gave them permission to have it. An example is the credit monitoring companies. The Washington Post reported on how Experian lost 143 million people’s private data and nothing happened to them and worse, they continued to collect our data. They are not the only ones, there are banks, stores and others who have lost our data and the joke is we are told we have to protect our data which is turning out to be impossible. Even government agencies have lost our data and the VA is one of them. As far as attacks on individuals by criminals, the email system has been quite a help to them. Criminals know if they send out the right threating letter which makes people scared because it pretends you owe money to a government agency and states if you don’t come up with cash you will go to jail or a relative will be deported they will get a response from a few people so they bulk email a million people. Many an elderly person has fallen for this and lost their life savings. Some of the people doing this are in countries where we can’t touch them. One of the places where the internet shines is in the field of entertainment. Who would have believed we could have access to so many movies years ago? Netflix and Amazon have enough movies and shows to last us forever since they are always being updated. Social networks provide ways for people to stay in touch no matter where they are located and the internet provides free phone calls through different apps. When the internet is used for good it is great and when it is used for bad it is ugly.
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