What Internet Can Do for People: Good or Harm?
A recent report really strikes me:an 18-year old teenager stabbed his mother to death merely for the convenience to steal money from home to support his internet adventure. The boy’s father growled in front of reporters after the incident , “What a hell is internet? It made a kid to kill his mother!”
He might be right. The internet may have helped the human society to process, the global economy to expand, it is also causing a great deal of griefs on the daily basis. This murder case is the most serious consequence. Nevertheless, there are many smaller impacts. With helps of the internet, families break up, kids drop out schools, businesses get scammed, people become lazy.
I knew a frequent visitor of a computer store. He came to the store for only one thing – having his badly damaged computer fixed. Why his computer got damaged so often? Because his wife loved to throw it out of window. He spent too much time in the cyberspace and had a hard time to survive when that space was shutdown.
A friend of mine sighs everyday as her son the high school couldn’t pass any tests in the school. Why? He contributed virtually every second he had to the rapid growth of internet traffic. What does he do in that traffic? The answer probably is well-known: chatting, gaming, reading – certainly improper contents – anyway, nothing is good.
Another friend of mine called his bank to report a number of fraud charges totaled over five thousand dollars from an online Internet casino, and surprisingly found out it was his teenage son who authorized all of those charges.
A company executive made a presentation in a conference. Audiences noticed a bunch of typos in his slide show. He embarrassingly explained, his spelling checker was disabled by a weird virus he got from the Internet.
A college professor lost his lifetime savings all because he saw an email from the Internet that offered him a great opportunity to get rich. The opportunity actually was the modernized version of a classic scam. Scammers sare smart. They have been using the internet effectively.
The list can go on and on. The cyberspace is expanding. When looking back, we have to ask ourselves a question: what the internet have done for us, more harm or more good? Perhaps there will never be a answer for it.
June 26th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Yes, internet does cause some problems, especially among teenagers. But great functions of the internet can’t be denied.
June 26th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
It’s not to talk the time to talk bad about internet. It’s a good tool definately. But we do need to manage the use of it.