The Dangers of The Internet

With the invention of the Internet the way we connect to others in their social world has changed forever. Internet brought us new ways of communication, learning and shopping. Now we can get to any part of the world with just a couple of clicks. The internet made our life in many cases so easy and much more convenient. But on the other hand, did it make it better? I doubt it. More and more people suffer from the bad influence of World Wide Web every day. There are serious negative long-term social affects, ranging from depression to loneliness (Stoll,648).

A lot of people claim that communication became more frequent in their lives as they don’t need to leave their houses to talk to friends or look for a romantic love in the bars and nightclubs. All you have to do is just open AIM or ICQ and all 100 friends of yours are there, waiting for your message. But obviously when the quantity grows the quality lowers. The overwhelming majority of online friendships aren’t deep (Stoll,650). You can’t replace face-to-face conversation with messages on the screen. There are no emotions, no real eye-contact оn the Internet. And without all these there is no real conversation. Indeed, Stoll pointed in his article “Isolated by the Internet” that by spending more time in a virtual reality we are losing social skills, and some ordinary situations become awkward to us.

The other thing that Internet gave us is the ability to create a separate virtual life, virtual identity. In the virtual life you can be whoever you want to be: a superman, or a super sexy model, or maybe a billionaire with a Bentley parked in a driveway. Sherry Turkle takes a closer look at the people leaving in a virtual reality. By using the examples from MUD – new kind of virtual parlor game and a new form of community (Turkle,677) she tries to find out how the Internet changes us, and creates multiple various identities.

Sherry introduces us to a couple of MUD players, and all of them feel more comfortable in a virtual life than in a real one. However, I think that we all need to escape from our real lives from time to time. But will you prefer to be a superman with a Bentley or just a regular worker from the factory? I think the answer is obvious. After some time spent in your imaginary dream-world you eventually get hooked. Especially teenagers who didn’t find themselves yet in the real life are more likely to be the victims of the beautiful virtual life. They fall in love with their dreams, become addicted to them (Turkle, 686). Like Stewart, Andrei and Zoe they succeed in a virtual world and fail in the real one. But if we have lost reality in the process, we shall have struck a poor bargain (Turkle, 686).

So the Internet has transformed our lives a lot. But together with all the good things, it brought a lot of negative factors into them as well. And right now people are so excited by a fast developing of the technologies that these factors have just being pulled aside and ignored. While this is not right, as if we don’t take care of it today, and don't find the balance between the virtual and real life, tomorrow maybe too late.