Digital Frontiers

The Internet

The internet is everything in today’s world. It provides us with any and all information we could want while we sit at home. Who hasn’t sat at Wikipedia for hours learning random information? The internet is where we shop on Amazon, talk to friends on Facebook, research on Wikipedia, watch our television on Hulu – it’s hard to imagine a single facet of life that isn’t in the process of or already engulfed by the internet. If I lost all access to the internet today, I would never be able to write a good research paper again, period. I would lose contact with almost all of my friends and acquaintances and I would be so bored that I would probably take up a second job just to pass the time, but I wouldn’t be able to because I wouldn’t have the internet to tell me who is hiring.

I think it is this dependence we have developed on the internet that makes any censorship of the internet seem that much more wrong. To censor the internet is to censor life. It’s the same idea as book banning, there will always be instances where it’s perfectly legal and necessary, but their will always be a stigma attached to it. We will never truly ‘police’ the internet or have a regulatory body that resides over it because it goes entirely against the nature of the internet. The internet will always be an open, mass of content. There will be those who abuse this, and their will have to be new innovations to stop them. But size alone would halt any effort to actually oversee the whole internet.