Group 1: More The Same (as Daniel's allocated)

The inter-Not in year 2015

The internet is changing the world??? This is a fallacy just like the Y2K bug

Effect on the quality of life

The internet is a tool that has helped the sharing of information, but the grunt of work is still done by humans. The processor speed has increased to 50 gigahertz per second and most PCs have over 1000 gigabytes of memory. Although there are significant advancements in technology, the average work week has actually increased to 50 hours. With the capital expenditure in newer computer platforms, companies are expecting more from their employees to compensate for the large outflow of money.

Technology, such as PDAs and Blackberrys, are returned to the companies since executive were having difficulty drawing the line between work and home. Being able to answer emails immediately did not seem worth the loss of personal time and privacy. The stress of receiving emails during dinner time and on vacations had increased work-related depression.

The expectations of the wide spread changes that the internet would bring did not materialize because

- The economy taking to long to come out of the recession that started at the turn of the century did not supply enough cash flow to facilitate the R&D into technology. Investors grow weary of the variability in the returns of the growth stocks, such as computer hardware and application developer, leading to a shift of capital to more stable industries such as utilities and consumer goods.

- Large corporations faced pressure for outsourcing services to lower wage countries. But the privacy risk of the emerging countries and the strong resistance of labour forces in the developed countries, caused political intervention to make shift work abroad more difficult.

- Limitations of software – algorithms that is used in most programming language reached their borders. Computer applications are not able to deal with the complexity to solve the problems that require human adaptability. Some characteristics are not able to convert into a variable that can be defined such as time and situation circumstances, much of the grey area that mangers have to use their judgment.

- Companies reduce the employee access to the internet after analyzing the personal use during business hours and realize that productivity is significantly hampered by this constant distraction. Although the product availability is vast in 2015, consumers prefer not to use their personal time to searching for products, which has disappointing results for online retailers.

- Tensions that rise due to the European Union to reduce differences to promote strength, mainly through the use of the Euro currency, has negative effects on the issue of globalization. The lost of cultural identity become major area of debate.

E-Business

The number of purchases conducted on the web has significantly decreased due to the high amounts of unauthorized transactions. Credit cards companies that initially protected customers for transactions that the goods were not received or not as expected. But due to the high costs of this form of insurance, customers are left to use their own discretion when buying products online.

Another thing that has been growing at a nice pace for the last ten years, but without the extremes everyone seemed to expect back in 2005, is internet transactions. Both consumers and businesses have indeed increased their spending on goods through the internet; the total B2B e-commerce market is now at almost $4 trillion, while the consumer market has reached almost $500 billion. This growth has come mostly from the increase in so-called web services, where applications are able to communicate directly with each other in areas such as inventory control, security checks and travel services. In short, these systems act as chains of interlinked services, such that if one system triggers an event to another system via an XML message, the receiving system treats the trigger according to its own rules. For instance, when Dell’s inventory levels of XRAM chips run below the re-order point, Dell’s SAP system orders a new shipment of chips from Samsung’s Taipei II plant automatically, and a report is made by a similar XML call to the Mozilla mail server. The main reasons the growth has not been stronger, as it was expected to reach this level ten years ago by optimists in the early 2000’s, has mainly been security concerns and the social needs for interaction, especially in the B2C market. The security concerns were the main reason Microsoft lost its grip on the web browser software back in 2006, when Mozilla Firefox took over as the dominant browser. With a stronger focus on security, Firefox, originally released in 2004 as open-source software, gave users a solution to their fear of being cheated when buying goods on the internet. Firefox’s three-way verification and escrow service (in co-operation with PayPal) proved a very solid solution to most security issues regarding misuse of credit information. The social need for interaction has however acted as a balancing loop in the trend of increasing e-commerce. It has become more and more evident that human beings have a need for interaction also when it comes to e-commerce. Long believed to be negligible in importance, scientists were amazed to discover that the need to see, feel and negotiate products in real life was strong also with the younger generations. An issue that was raised by labor unions, job preservation through real life interaction was also a hot topic a few years back. However, it seems the social interaction patterns themselves were stronger than these arguments.

Education

Internet did not change the education patterns as it was expected. The increase of Internet usage and the potential as an education tool created the whole bunch of services and applications to develop courses and learning content. Some of these contents were done without any pedagogic criteria, and the ones that were developed under strict educational rules did not show any significant results in improving the education process. Some of the Internet education tools were useful and got certain impact as helping tool to the traditional educational methods, but any of the e-learning materials was able to substitute the traditional way of teaching neither in the school nor in the University. Moreover, the new degrees based on Internet, that quickly expanded during the beginning of the 2000, were not accepted by the companies nor the administration as a competitive degrees, as they were perceived a cheap and easy studies with little practical experience. Therefore, most of the students that followed this type of education were disappointed, as they could hardly find a job in their field due to the poor recognition of their degree. The bad reputation quickly expanded over the prospects candidates, and they realized the little pay off of following this type of the degrees. In 2015, there was almost not companies offering e-learning, most of them were bankrupt.

The control of Internet

The control of internet by governments, which had been expected to increase dramatically because of its use for terrorist purposes, has never taken off. As a matter of fact, the international and national terrorism which had seen its pick in the beginning of the third millennium, started to have less appeal among people thanks to three different factors:

- A strong decrease in the discrepancy between social classes in countries;

- A change in the political and military policy towards countries with oil deposits;

- A lack of money to fund terrorism;

The decrease in the discrepancy between social classes was the result of both the reverse trend in outsourcing mentioned above, and the national will to maintain a right balance between globalization and cultural identity. These trends lead to a situation where local job markets were no-more threatened by low-wage countries, and therefore, they could experience more stability.

The change in the political and military policy towards countries with oil deposits, was mainly due to the fact that by 2010 the use of hydrogen as a source of energy became a reality. As a consequence, the world lost its interest in countries rich of oil deposits. These countries, and their inhabitants, stopped to feel controlled and manipulated by the most developed countries. The Arabic countries for example, which had been funding the international terrorism, lost their main source of revenues, and they had not more money, and interest, to go on with their terrorism sponsoring activity.

Effects of emerging countries on advancement of Internet

Conflict of interests on Internet between emerging countries and development strain the advancement of the internet. In 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held in Tunis hosted by the Government of Tunisia resulted in breakdown between emerging countries, such as China, Brazil and African countries, and developed countries, such as the U.S.A, European countries, Canada, Australia and Japan. They could not agree on Internet governance. The emerging countries claim that political administration should be controlled not by ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which is a non-profit corporation and is located in California in the U.S.A, but by intergovernmental organization such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), implying that emerging countries want to control of Internet while trying to strip it from the U.S.A. On the contrary, developed countries claimed that private-sector-driven scheme should be continued because that is more flexible and efficient to organize than governmental scheme, implying that developed countries want to keep continue current situation since Internet business is developing well from their perspectives. In 2009, Internet governance by ICANN affected by the U.S.A government increased their power in terms of technology as well as politics. Then number of Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation for emerging market was reduced which resulted in restrain of launch of web page originated emerging market. Generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management was controlled in favor of developed countries. Although the fund, so called “Digital Joint Fund”, had been discussed for long time in order to cover cost of Internet prevalence in emerging countries, this fund had not realized because of the strong objection by developed countries. In 2014, as a result of above conflict over Internet between emerging countries and developed countries, conventional media such as radio and TV remained as major role to provide information in emerging countries. In some countries such as China, freedom of press on the Internet was regulated as it was in 2005. This added up to strain of development of Internet in emerging countries. As a result, while Internet was popularized more in developed countries than it was in 2005, it was not in emerging countries.

Why the Internet Is No Substitute for a Library

Reading is culture. Given the condition of reading test scores among school children, it isn’t surprising to find nations around the world in trouble. Further, the rush to internetize all schools adds to the downward spiral. If it were not for the Harry Potter books one might lose all hopes. Then, suddenly, you realize libraries really are in trouble, grave danger, when important higher-education officials opine, “Don’t you know the Internet has made libraries obsolete?” But Internet is no substitute for a library.

With over 8 billion Web pages you couldn’t tell it by looking. Nevertheless, very few substantive materials are on the Internet for free. For example, only about 8% of all journals are on the Web, and an even smaller fraction of books are there. Both are costly! If you want the Journal of Biochemistry, Physics Today, Journal of American History, you’ll pay, and to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Internet is like a vast uncataloged library. Whether you’re using Hotbot, Lycos, Dogpile, Infoseek, or any one of a dozen other search or metasearch engines, you’re not searching the entire Web. Sites often promise to search everything but they can’t deliver. Moreover, what they do search is not updated daily, weekly, or even monthly, regardless of what’s advertised. If a librarian told you, “Here are 10 articles on Native Americans. We have 40 others but we’re not going to let you see them, not now, not yet, not until you’ve tried another search in another library,” you’d throw a fit. The Internet does this routinely and no one seems to mind.

Yes, we need the Internet, but in addition to all the scientific, medical, and historical information (when accurate), there is also a cesspool of waste. When young people aren’t getting their sex education off XXX-rated sites, they’re learning politics from the Freeman Web page, or race relations from Klan sites. There is no quality control on the Web, and there isn’t likely to be any. Unlike libraries where vanity press publications are rarely, if ever, collected, vanity is often what drives the Internet. Any fool can put up anything on the Web, and, probably, all have.

Officials think they can now buy one book and distribute to every library on the Web. No! We could have one national high school, a national university, and a small cadre of faculty teaching everybody over streaming video. Let’s take this one step further and have only digitized sports teams for real savings! Since 1970 about 50,000 academic titles have been published every year. Of these 1.5 million titles, fewer than a couple thousand are available. What is on the Net are about 20,000 titles published before 1925. Why? No copyright restrictions that cause prices to soar to two or three times their printed costs. Finally, vendors delivering e-books allow only one digitized copy per library. Most of us have forgotten what we said about microfilm (“It would shrink libraries to shoebox size”), or when educational television was invented (“We’ll need fewer teachers in the future”). Try reading an e-book reader for more than a half-hour. Headaches and eyestrain are the best results. Besides, if what you’re reading is more than two pages long, what do you do? Print it.

California Polytechnic State University, home of the world’s highest concentration of engineers and computer geeks, explored the possibility of a virtual (fully electronic) library for two years. Their solution was a $42-million traditional library with, of course, a strong electronic component. In other words, a fully virtualized library just can’t be done.

But a Virtual State Library Would Do It, Right? Do what, bankrupt the state? Yes, it would. The cost of having everything digitized is incredibly high. Questia Media, the biggest such outfit, just spent $125 million digitizing 50,000 books released in one month. At this rate, to virtualize a medium-sized library of 400,000 volumes would cost a mere $1,000,000,000! Then you need to make sure people have equitable access everywhere they need it, when they need it. Finally, what do you do with rare and valuable primary sources once they are digitized? Take them to the dump? And you must hope the power never, ever goes out. Sure, students could still read by candlelight, but what would they be reading?

The Internet Is Ubiquitous but Books Are Portable. In a recent survey of those who buy electronic books, more than 80% said they like buying paper books over the Internet, not reading them on the Web. We have nearly 1,000 years of reading print in our bloodstream and that’s not likely to change in the next 75. Granted, there will be changes in the delivery of electronic materials now, and those changes, most of them anyway, will be hugely beneficial. But humankind, being what it is, will always want to curl up with a good book—not a laptop—at least for the foreseeable future.

The Web is great; but it’s a woefully poor substitute for a full-service library. It is mad idolatry to make it more than a tool. Libraries are icons of our cultural intellect, totems to the totality of knowledge. If we make them obsolete, we’ve signed the death warrant to our collective conscience, not to mention sentencing what’s left of our culture to the waste bin of history. No one knows better than librarians just how much it costs to run a library. They are always looking for ways to trim expenses while not contracting service. The Internet is marvellous, but to claim, as some now do, that it’s making libraries obsolete is as silly as saying shoes have made feet unnecessary.