INTERNET –
MAKING THE WORLD A MIRACULOUS GLOBAL VILLAGE…
My dear
fellow netizens! How are you on this beautiful day? Today , I’ve got the
wonderful opportunity to write to you as an egalitarian netizen and by that I
mean I truly belong to the Utopian Society of equality and empowerment. Yes my
kinfolk! You are one hundred percent right! We are all united irrespective of
caste,creed ,age,religion,sex and other discriminatory factors which had
originally emerged due to ignorance. I can proudly state that the uniting
factor is the INTERNET.
Evolution
follows certain stringent rules of natural selection and it must be understood
that before human civilization began, the only thing that could protect us
humans from extinction was our ability to communicate. It is beyond shadow of a
doubt that this was the ability which was responsible for the establishment of
village based communities which slowly thickened into empires. The imperial
order was powerful and led to a lot of development. As human beings evolved,
they recognized the importance of democracy in which each and every citizen had
a say. With democracy, people began to explore their own passions. It occurred
to them that their little ideas actually mattered and that their ideas had
brought forth technology that touched the lives of many people. The Industrial
revolution helped in broadening of the manufacturing sector so that many people
could benefit from the ideas. The poets didn’t consider it a good sign. But it
certainly was a miracle in the truest sense of the word. A miracle that was
both witnessed and experienced not just by a select few but by a global
audience. The next big revolution was the information revolution which can
quite aptly be defined as the proliferation of the availability of information
and the accompanying changes in its storage and dissemination owing to the use
of computers. It must be understood that the
accelerated rate of progress in this field can be partially attributed to the world wars which had preceded it. To
give you a small precedent, jet engines, computers, navigation systems,
microwave ovens and the technology to put man on the moon all came from
technology invented or rapidly improved upon during the war. Although the war gave rise to a lot
of technological advancement, it wont be redundant to say that it divided the
world into smaller and smaller segments. It was during this time and
surprisingly in this backdrop , in the post war period that the Internet came
into existence. In these most dramatic
of times when the world was extremely divided, few scientists began to dream
about a unified world where people from one part of the world could communicate
freely with people from another part. They realized their dream and were
successful in facilitating the transfer of ideas from one part of the world to
another . Today, it is difficult for us to imagine that we were once citizens
of a differentiated world. All we know today is that we through our social
networking, online banking, online shopping, etc., have access to every person,
idea and thing and this makes us the netizens of a Global Village.
I have
talked about how important the exchange of ideas is and how the internet is
responsible for it. I would like to conclude by answering a rather simple
question. What do we understand by the term ‘INTERNET’ . What is the picture
that comes to our mind when we hear this word? Well most people imagine the
internet to be a cloud. It is not true however that it is a cloud. In fact
Internet consists of a lot of connections and interconnections. Hence the internet is essentially a large
bunch of wires called optic cables which connect across continents. The
information through these wires travels not in the form of electricity but in
the form of light. Light travels through thousands of miles of optical fibres
which go under sea! Can you believe it ! There are real cables which connect
one continent to another and these cables lie under the oceans. Thus INTERNET
connects the world together and this is not just any figurative statement!
The Internet
quite literally connects the world together.
