The Pros and Cons of the Internet

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The internet is a vast network of computers that connects many of the world’s businesses, institutions, and individuals. It allows millions of people throughout the world to send and receive messages to each other, share information, and play games (Naughton 4). It was initially designed to aid the government and help people expand academically, but it is now becoming more commercialized and used in ways that it was not made for.

The thought of the internet was first introduced in 1960 when the United States Department of Defense was concerned about nuclear warfare and wanted to do what it could to protect America against foreign threats. With the help of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Department of Defense was able to link a network of university and military computers together (Gillies 26). By 1981, only two hundred computers were linked to ARPANet, the name of the network. It was way too hard to access the internet at that time because it required memorizing master series of programming manuals or referring to a manual constantly (Naughton 172). Few people knew about the internet and even fewer were interested.

In 1991, the World Wide Web was introduced to the world. It was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Naughton 58). The company used hypertext markup language (HTML) to link information from computer to computer all throughout the world. It allowed people to jump easily from one computer’s resources to another (Gralla 169). In 1993, web browsers were initiated and it brought overwhelming growth to the internet (Naughton 61).

This was the first step to the internet being used in more complex ways. Now that the internet was able to ...

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Works Cited

Bocij, Paul. The Dark Side of the Internet. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2006.

Borzekowski, Dina. Internet Use Involves Both Pros and Cons for Children and

Adolescents, According to Special ISSUE of Developmental Psychology.

30 Apr. 2006. < http://www.apa.org/releases/youthwww0406.html>.

17 March 2008.

Gillies, James. How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. New York:

Oxford University Press Inc., 2000.

Gralla, Preston. How the Internet Works: Millennium Edition. USA: Que Publishing,

1998.

Kraut, Robert E. The Impact of Home Computer Use on Children’s Activities and

Development. < http://www.futureofchildren.org/information2826/information_

show.htm?doc_id=69826>. 17 March 2008.

Naughton, John. A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet. Phoenix:

Orion Books Ltd., 2000.

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