How Would Life be Different Without the Internet?

Today, our lives are completely dependent on the Internet. I cannot imagine life without using the Internet. However, the world was working properly ten years ago, when the Internet was not popularized yet. It is generally said that popularization of the Internet has contributed to our lives becoming better, but is it true? How would our lives be without the use of the Internet?

Convenience is one of the greatest features of using the Internet. The Internet shows its real ability when using it to research something. Instead of going to libraries, looking for books, and flipping pages of a book with a pile of books in front of you, all you need to do is type keywords on research engine and press the enter key. It takes no time, and it is easy to gain information from various media.

Anyone can communicate with people far away through the Internet. One example is Facebook, a social networking service. A person is able to connect with people he/she has met online, and become “friends”. It is an easy way to expand your network all over the world.

Furthermore, using the Internet can reduce the amount of paper consumed. Sending e-mails instead of writing letters is one example. Nowadays it has become possible to read books online and some authors are publishing their works on the Internet instead of books. As radical deforestation is mentioned as one of the most serious environmental problems, one can contribute to the protection of environment by saving paper.

However, there are some disadvantages of using the Internet. As I have already mentioned, the Internet is very convenient when researching information. To put it on the other way around, one does not need to think deeply in order to do a research, and it is resulting in preventing people to deliberate their original thoughts. Some people even copy the exact same words from another person’s work. This is called plagiarism and this action is illegal, but there are too many cases to arrest them all.

In the third paragraph, I had talked about the Internet as means of communication. However there are limits to what the Internet can do. Because there is no real-life communication in the Internet, people often find it easy to say horrible things to criticize others. It is hard to find out who had contributed such things, and it sometimes develops into a serious harassment such as bullying.

How much time do you spend every day using the Internet? The Internet is addictive and most of the time sitting in front of the computer could be simply a waste of time. If there was time for using the Internet, it could be more meaningful to spend that time for reading books.

Without the Internet, our life would undeniably become less convenient. However, the Internet is preventing us from having original thoughts, talking to someone face to face, and spending free time more productively. Deprived of using the Internet, perhaps we could learn to enrich our life and notice what is truly important in our life.