Everyone is an should be connected. At least that is the ideal of the network. The rapid development of technology has made it possible for human to save most of the hours in a day to relax and think about the others. Automation allows people to escape broing daily works such as cooking and washing clothes. The AI-powered machines are available to satisfy your primary and secondary needs. Now, they also give you almost unlimited facilities to connect to anyone around the world. The success of virtual world depends on the convenience and practicality that the computers provide. In the last 2 centuries, the scientists have been competing to invent handy gadgets that permit the users to perform multi-tasking.
If we trace back the history of the virtual world, we will meet a horrendous starting point: Cold War, which is a nuclear-armed deadly competition between two superpowers at the moment. ARPA and ARPANET, ancestors of Internet, were used to connect military bases all over the USA and its allies' territories with the database in the big universities. To fortify the new-founded network, the American scientists chose to attempt new method of communication line. Radio waves are definetely vulnerable to the Russian spies, so they selected the new satellites to transmit the data. It was widely supported since USA had been successful in its late space mission, notably after successfully landing men on the moon. From this point, we can see that the basic of all technology is merely for survival. Indeed, it is still relevant now. The fastest and most powerful computers in the world now are still owned by the military, not by personal users.
After the war threat reduces, the purpose of technology gradually changes into life's convenience. The USA found that their technology was too advanced and would be wasteful if used only for military purpose, so they began to open the network to the universities students. Thanks to some briliant scholars, the public web is formed in the mid 1980s. The HTML and HTTP were introduced in the 1990s and Netscape took the giant step to create a program to access it in the IBM personal computer. The world of Internet for the public has been born.
In the beginning of the 21st century, many briliant inventions have been made in the web. Search engines such as Yahoo and Google start the public addiciton of Internet. Internet has been transformed into a big library where everyone doesn't need to scrutinize each shelves to access the information needed. The second great invention is the internet-based e-mail. Based on the classic concept of telegram, the e-mail is the key point why the Internet is so popular now. Other sites, such as blog, mailing list and social networking sites, follow and use the e-mail account as the identification code of each individual.
Besides those sites, a great advantage of Internet is that you do not have to be yourself. You do not need to input your green card number in the real life to be able to create an account. You can always hide your real name and your real age. This ability to create a new identity for yourself is a relieve for most of the people who deny the reality which is never perfect for everyone.
However, if you are able to use fake identity, is it still proper to call Internet a form of communication? To pretend to be someone else and give false information is a form of de-communcation, I guess.
The function of the Internet does not stop at that point. As I mention before, Internet has been a great library that cans ave any kind of informations. That also means anyone can claim false informations to be true in the Internet. We can never know which site is dependable since Internet is open for everyone. Trustworthy site can modified by those who are experienced in the technical side of the Internet (we usually call them 'hackers').
Maybe I would put it more correctly that Internet is actually a neutral tool of sharing informations and connecting people. Due to the technology development, it is getting more powerful and more influential. It has reached to the level that it can infiltrate anyone's life and distort the priority of life of many people. People are connected with Internet. Yes, connected with the Internet, not the real other people. Do not forget that when you are on the Internet, it is the AI machine that you are really chatting to, laughing to, and blaming to. Internet is our external sense that can deceive us everytime. Moreover, as it gets more complicated, the accuracy of Internet is also descending down. The more important a thing is, the bigger the chance you get fooled with that thing. Hence, when the Internet has stolen your life priority and become an indispensable thing in your life, you should be careful and more cautious with the content of the web.
The real connection between people is still the direct interaction using our body, not our artificial body. If you want to make sense of the real world, that is the best way to express yourself. It may be not convenient, but at least you get better acurracy. I'm not saying that your internal sense never deceive you. I'm also not against the virtual world.
The real logical paradox comes with this article. When I urge, or let's say this article which is seemingly written by me, that Internet should not be trusted as you trust your sense, this information is also not worth enough to be trusted. This is like saying 'I'm telling the truth that I am lying'. This is a logical contradiction. Therefore, which one should be trusted.
Better put it this way. This article is typed and published by the website that is located in an Internet server, not by me. I am only the one who inputs the data to the Internet. I only tell the machine to produce a writting that I want to be published in some manners. Afterwards, it is up to the machine how it is going to put my article on my web, since I trust the website to code the rest instructions and I don' want to know further about the real coding. And you, the readers, are accessing this information. The information that you read is the output from several codes from the main server. It is like DNA replication; the main purpose is accuracy but there is always a slight change in each output, though with the help of the technology, the distortion is getting smaller. Nonetheless, how if I, as the writter, put some instructions to the machine to tell the wrong information? It is unjustifiable to blame the machine for spreading untrue informations. Internet is a ethereal nest of spammers and liars.
Remember, each time you are chatting with somebody, adding a friend in Facebook or downloading the information from school website, you are not interacting with the real person. You are communicating with an intelligent machine that translate your inputs into codes then process it to provide an output in the way that the program behaves.
Everyone is still not connected by the virtual world then. Everyone is connect with binary codes in the form of cute words and pictures....