Life Before the Internet Versus After the Internet
This essay is a comparative study on life before and after the internet came into being. The focus is more on those issues that have affected our life the most, like communication media, relationships, business, etc. This also discusses the similarities that existed between life before the internet and after.
Life before the internet versus after the internet
In the following essay, we discuss the similarities and contrasts that existed between life before the internet and life after the internet, referring to (Ashley). It includes the various changes that occurred to human life in terms of relationships, work, communication mode, etc with the advent of the internet.
Life without the internet is something that is hard to believe for the kids of the present generation. Before the advent of the internet, for communication one had to depend completely on the post office or old age telephone services. The whole process was cumbersome and expensive. Only the rich could afford all these services. The rest of the world remained in dark. Before the internet came into existence, the terms friendship and relationship had a lot of meaning. There were no virtual friends. Everything was so real. To know what’s happening in the world, one had to wait for the morning newspaper. To plan a trip, one had to visit the travel agent and find out whether the ticket was available. For checking his/her bank account or for transferring his/her money to some other bank, a person had to physically go to the bank and complete necessary formalities. For accessing books, one had to go to the library which was literally a routine for people who were fond of reading. For advertising a product, one had to go all the way to the advertising agency and wait for days to ensure that the advertisement was accepted or not. To say about, there are lots. If you ask people of those generations, they would surely say that they miss the life before the internet. Even though people say the internet led to globalization, some still feel that they were closer to each other when there was no internet.
Now, when we see life after the internet, it is altogether different. The Internet has become the mode of communication. It has taken over the functions of the post office, postman, and all the intermediary requirements. We can also keep a copy of the sent information. Communication has become much faster. And the technology comes at a cheap rate that anyone can afford it. The terms like virtual friends, chatting, phishing, blog, etc came into existence. Banking and other business transactions have become easy and fast. Friends are no longer real. No longer do we meet our relatives personally and hug them or get their blessings. The world has become so unreal. With the advent of the internet, advertising a product or service has become very easy. The Internet has indeed simplified our life to a great extent. To understand these differences one could refer to the web page- (What was Life like before the Internet).
It describes life before and after the internet in a very comic sense but does make us think actually how the internet has changed everyone’s life.
From all these observations one can conclude easily how the internet has helped us to be part of this fast-growing era. Life indeed has changed and we cannot expect it to be the same. Man has always found a way to deal with issues and surely will find ways to keep the values that have diminished after the internet boom. But, one should always remember that life has changed the way we wanted it to change and nothing was brought forcefully. It was our never-ending needs that led to these technologies and this need is the only common thing that existed in the life before the internet and life after the internet. The remaining things are direct consequences of our needs.
Works Cited
Ashley. Cyber Notes: Life before the Internet was Like: Cyber Notes by Cybernet. Cybernet News. 2009. Web.
What was Life like before the Internet. Joeschmidt.com. 2006. Web.
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Life Before and After The Internet
In 1991 the world-wide-web was launched. Many people were apprehensive to the new tool; “I fear the day technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots” a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein shows how even before the internet people were skeptical of new technology.
Twenty-seven years later a few people who didn’t grow up with the internet still fear it and how it affects our lives. However, the internet has revolutionized the way we communicate, learn, and make money. For centuries people had to mail their family for information but now they can text or email them, and their family will get it in a matter of seconds. People had to physically be in a classroom to learn new things, but now they can watch educational videos or podcasts about the topic they are learning.
The internet is a wonderful invention that should be cherished by older generations. The invention of computers and the internet has altered the way we view the world because it boosts the economy, connects people, and makes people more intelligent. The internet improves the economy by allowing people to make and spend money more freely. Today a lot of people use the internet to complete large transactions and pay their bills.
Everyone can manage their finances with the help of the internet by using excel spreadsheets and other similar programs. Seventy-one percent of people with bank accounts use online banking (Zhang). Many people who use online banking “show profitability-enhancing behaviors such as increased loyalty or product utilization” (Xue). People can also make money from home using the internet by taking paid surveys, selling their unneeded belongings on certain websites like eBay or Craigslist, or by selling handmade products on websites such as Etsy.
The internet has also allowed people to work from home using apps such as facetime and by sending documents over email. You Tube is also a way to make money if you have an interesting life or can teach a useful skill. Another way to make money off the internet is to advertise on a website that won’t allow adblockers.
Many websites force people to turn off their adblockers to access their website or they have to pay a fee. People can also shop online with apps that deliver food to their houses and online market places that allow people to spend less time in stores and more time doing things they enjoy.
The internet connects people by letting others talk to people around the world instantly. It is no surprise that people are feeling more connected than ever because “today, 3 billion people have access to the internet. Hundreds of millions of people are now part of online communities. Which makes the internet the largest community in history—as big as the global population in 1960” (Torricke-Barton).
Some people fear that the internet makes us less connected but, “a negative effect of the internet on social connectedness is less likely because adolescents have more opportunities to maintain their social network through this medium” (Valkenburg). The internet has bred many social media apps and instant messengers that people all around the world are using to their advantage. For example, someone in India can email or text a person in America and they could get the message instantly. Eighty-six percent of people use it to talk to their family or friends in different countries (Pew). Dating apps have also connected people by setting them up to meet others like them. With more than 7,500 dating apps around the world and more than 49 million users, it isn’t surprising to find out that thirteen percent of people on dating apps get engaged or married (Brooks).
Even though eighty-six percent of people don’t get married because of dating apps, most still form life-long friendships that they would never have had if they hadn’t met online (Emery). With all of this information, it is no surprise that “Online communication stimulated the quality of adolescents’ well-being” (Valkenburg). The internet promotes learning by allowing people across the globe to better their education.
Many schools have bought computers for their students to use because the computers give their students access to unlimited knowledge from multiple sources. This allows the students to write better papers and practice what they have learned. It has also let students expand their vocabulary more efficiently. Now instead of spending hours in a library searching for a book that may or may not have the information they’re looking for or flipping through a dictionary to make flashcards to study, students can use one of the multiple websites, online dictionaries, and flashcard websites.
Online thesauruses allow people to make their writing sound more eloquent and articulate. Online college programs have allowed students to further their education on their own time without having to move away from their families and jobs. It may seem like a low number but with the knowledge that 65 percent of college students and 23 percent of college graduates have taken an online course the fact that “fifteen percent of college students who have taken a class online has earned a degree entirely online” is very reassuring to those looking for an alternative to traditional college (Akanegbu).
People can also be updated on current events and can sound educated in formal conversations. The internet allows people to form their own opinions on world news. The internet is very helpful “for supporting individual study and engaging in educational projects” (Trentin). The internet has allowed many people to make more money, connect with others, and expand their knowledge. The internet has been a positive factor in reforming society according to seventy percent of people in the United States (Pew). Eighty-eight percent of people say it has been a positive influence in their lives (Pew). Now that people have become accustomed to the internet, life without it seems like a nightmare.
Without the internet some criminals would still be free because law enforcement officers use social media to track down criminals and find missing persons. Twenty-seven years ago, people didn’t have the luxury of being able to contact their friends instantly, learn a new skill in five minutes, or make money without leaving their house. They would have to get a nine to five job, mail things, and go to classes that don’t overlap with their jobs.
Today people can do a myriad of tasks with the help of the internet. Historically the internet is revolutionary even people who are skeptical of the internet can agree on that.
Works Cited
- Akanegbu, Anuli. “50 Striking Statistics About Distance Learning in Higher Education.”
- Technology Solutions That Drive Education, 12 July 2012, edtechmagazine.com.
- Brooks, Amber. “21 Amazing Online Dating Statistics – The Good, Bad & Weird (2018).”
- DatingAdvice.com, 14 May 2018, datingadvice.com.
- Emery, Lea Rose. “How Many People Who Meet On Apps Get Married?” Bustle, Bustle, 24 Aug. 2018, bustle.com.
- Pew Research Center. “Internet Seen as Positive Influence on Education but Negative on Morality in Emerging and Developing Nations.”
- Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, 17 Sept. 2018, pewglobal.org.
- Torricke-Barton, Dex. “How the Internet Is Uniting the World – Dex Torricke-Barton Medium.” Medium, Medium, 14 Oct. 2015, medium.com.
- Trentin, Guglielmo. “What Does ‘Using the Internet for Education’ Mean?” Educational Technology, vol. 39, no. 4, 1999, pp. 15–23. JSTOR, JSTOR, jstor.org.
- Valkenburg, Patti M., and Jochen Peter. “Social Consequences of the Internet for Adolescents: A Decade of Research.”
- Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 18, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–5. JSTOR, JSTOR, jstor.org.
- Xue, Mei, et al. “Determinants and Outcomes of Internet Banking Adoption.” Management Science, vol. 57, no. 2, 2011, pp. 291–307. JSTOR, JSTOR, jstor.org.
- Zhang, Richard. “Consumer Banking: Statistics and Trends in 2018.” ValuePenguin, ValuePenguin, 16 July 2018, valuepenguin.com.
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The Internet- Life Before and After
What were some of the greatest changes that occurred as a result of the first internet? How has the internet changed the way we live? Let's find out more about The Internet- Life Before and After.
What were some of the greatest changes that occurred as a result of the first internet?
Invention of the internet has resulted in a completely different way of life for everyone who lives it. The internet has made it easier for people to communicate with each other, and it has also led to the beginning of the largest social and technological revolution in human history.
Now, with the internet, people can communicate with each other easily and cheaply. In addition, there are many websites and applications that allow people to conduct business tasks like emailing and ordering. These new technologies have made the world a different place than it was before.
How has the internet changed the way we live?
Internet has changed the way people communicate and have interact with each other. It has allowed for a great deal of instant communication between people and has made it possible to easily find what you are looking for. Additionally, the internet has helped people to get a better understanding of the world around them and has taught them alot about different cultures.
There has been a lot of changes to our lives since the internet was invented. Before the internet we had to go outside and look for information. Now we can just seek out information online. This has given us so much freedom and options. We can now do whatever we want without having to worry about getting in trouble.
The internet has also changed the way we think about the world. Before the internet people thought that everything was single-sided and good or bad. But now, with the internet, we can see how everyone is involved in this great big global community. We can see how everyone is fighting for their own interests and wants something different from what the other people have. This has made us more spread out and closer to each other than ever before.
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What were the main problems that people faced before and after the internet came into being?
Internet has had a major impact on our lives in a number of ways. It has made it easier for us to communicate with each other, have more connections, and run businesses. However, there are also some drawbacks to the internet. For example, it has made it difficult to keep personal relationships healthy. This can lead to more disharmony and turmoil in our lives. Additionally, the internet can also be addictive and cause people to become spending more hours online than they would if they were living in a physical area.
The Gutenberg Press was invented in 1455 by Johannes Gutenberg. The first printing press was built in Venice, Italy, in 1455. In 1547, the first book was printed with a movable type machine. By the mid 1800s, the internet had started to take off and people were communicating online at an increased rate than ever before. However, there were some key issues that still existed during this time. For one, communication media still wasn't as accessible to everyone as it is today. For example, even though movies were made with sound and video technology in the 1800s, most people only had access to a handful of them at a time and couldn't watch them anywhere easily. Additionally, relationships still weren't as developed as they are today due to the lack of communication technology and social media platforms back then. Lastly, business didn't exist yet as we know it today.
What was the impact of the internet on the lives of individuals?
Internet has had a profound impact on the lives of individuals. It has allowed people to communicate better and has had a positive effect on many aspects of life. It has brought about changes in the way people do their work and in their social lives. The internet has helped to create morefree and closed-minded societies, but it also has given rise to innovative new businesses and technologies. Notwithstanding some negative aspects of the internet, it is an important part of our global culture and economy.
Since the internet was invented, people have been able to communicate with each other easily and communicate their ideas and thoughts to a large group of people. The internet has allowed people to meet new friends, learn new things, and make more money than they would have if they had to go out and find customers. The internet has also allowed for the development of new industries, such as online dating, online shopping, and online gaming.
The internet has also had a negative effect on people. In some cases, the internet has caused people to become addicted to pornography and other illegal activities. Additionally, the internet has caused individuals to neglect their social lives and family relationships. In some cases, the internet has even led to sexual predator getting caught because they can now easily target users who are not well-remembered or who live in remote areas.
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What was life like before the internet?
Daily Dot has a really interesting article about what life was like before the internet. It is a pain to find information, especially anything factual, as there are so many websites and articles out there. However, looking up information on the internet did have its benefits. For example, people could now easily find relevant information on any topic, no matter how obscure or strange it might be. Additionally, the internet made it easier for people to stay connected with friends and family all over the world.
There was no McDonald's and therefore, no Slurpee. We had to be very careful about not wasting food because it would have to be cooked over an open flame in the oven. There were also no video games. All we had was baseball, basketball, and occasionally hockey. The only way to really get into those games was if we could find a copy of the game on somebody's home computer or if we found a game antennae at a local game store. We would watch the game until our eyes were adaptational to the bright light of theThankfully, our parents didn't spend all their time online .
What did people do in pre-Internet days?
Internet has definitely had a positive impact on our lives. It has helped us connect with each other more easily and it has given us the opportunity to do things we wouldn't have otherwise been able to do. However, there are also some downsides to the internet that we must be aware of. For example, there is the fact that it can be addictive and it can be difficult to have balance in our lives because so much of our food, entertainment, and social activities are now based off of internet connections.
2) Can You Do Something For Me?
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One of the more popular online activities was text messaging. People would send messages to each other, discussing all sorts of topics. SMS gave people a way to communicate without having to worry about the potential consequences of their words. It also allowed people to be hands-on with each other, which definitely enhanced the quality of interactions.
When did you first learn about the internet?
Oldest members of Generation X are the last to remember what it was like to have a life without the internet. The generation is the last to remember what life was like before the internet. They are especially remember the before times when translators could only communicate with each other through writing.
Generation X is the last generation who will remember what it was like to have a life without the internet, especially the oldest members of this group. For them, life before the internet was about learning about new cultures and experiencing different types of information. The internet changed everything for this group, and they will never be able to forget it.
What are the consequences of the internet age?
Internet has had a significant impact on our lives, offering opportunities for people to explore their creativity and interests. With the increased accessibility of information and communication, there is now no shortage of opportunities for people to develop their skills.
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But what about the future? What about the ways in which the internet will change our lives and the different ways that it will impact our businesses? The internet is alreadychanging our lives in many ways - it's made it possible for people to communicate and collaborate more easily, and it's also made it possible for businesses to connect with a wider audience. But there are still some issues that need to be addressed, and there are also some concerns that need to be considered if we want to see the biggest Benefits of the internet in the future. For example, how will cookies affect our privacy? How will robots take over many jobs in the future, making us even less likely to interact with the internet? And what about immigration - will people be able to work or study onthe internet from any country? These are just a few examples of how
the Age might change how we use and interact withthe internet.
What are some of the significant differences between life before the internet and life after the internet?
Speed of communication and the availability of information have been significant differences between life before the internet and life after the internet. Before the internet, people were able to communicate with others easily and access information at any time. This was aadvantage for those who wanted to learn or grow their knowledge. Additionally, the internet made it possible for people to connect with other individuals from around the world, which added another layer of convenience to life. After the internet, people are now limited in what they can see and know. They are also unable to access as much information as they once could. This has had a significant impact on working and living lives.
There was a significant period of time where people only communicated with each other through letter writing and talking about personal experiences. The internet changed all that, making it easier for everyone to communicate and share information.
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What are some of the consequences of technological advancements that have not been universally accepted by all?
World has been drastically different since the early days of the internet. nearly fifty years ago, social media updates, websites, and technological tools were limited to a few select individuals and businesses. Cell phones and apps were still relatively new, and the production of them was still sporadic and limited.
The first thing that wasn't there fifteen years ago, was the internet. This was a time when people didn't even have connection cables, let alone the ability to use it for communication. The internet quickly became synonymous with communication, instead of being a novelty. In its earliest days, there weren't many websites or social media platforms, as people were primarily responsible for communicating with each other through talking to their friends and family. Today, the internet has completely changed the way we communicate and interacted with each other. It has replaced our traditional methods of communication, such as conversation and writing. We now communicate through text and email, instead of actually meeting in person. We also communicate through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Technology has allowed us to connect with more people than ever before, but has also led us astray from our original characteristics.
Internet wikipedia.org Life Before Life wikipedia.org The Internet and Daily Life pewresearch.org Early Internet internethistory.org NCES Blog ed.gov Before and after plainlanguage.gov Life Before The Internet: What Did People Do? uopeople.edu After the Internet mit.edu
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What are some of the biggest cyber security threats facing businesses today? What technological advancement has had a significant impact on human employment in the coming decade or two? Let's find out more about The Impact of Technological Advancements On Job Security.
School Life Balance , Tips for Online Students
How Was Life Before The Internet – What Did People Do?
Updated: July 11, 2022
Published: June 1, 2021
It’s hard to imagine a time in the world where smartphones and social media weren’t an integral part of your life. Let’s go back to what seems like an eternity ago, to see how life before the internet was different.
10 Ways Life Was Different Before The Internet
Amazon was just a river/rain forest.
If the word Amazon was mentioned in a sentence, it was only in reference to the river in South America. No one could think about the possibility of online stores .
Planning ahead
Last-minute plans were not possible once you left your house. You’d be very careful to set up exact meeting times and locations with your friends.
Recorded music off the radio / mix tapes
If there was a song that you loved, you would have to record it off the radio. Looking for a compilation of songs? You’d have to make that yourself too.
You needed to leave your house to socialize
There was no online shopping or Zoom — if you wanted to buy something or see a friend, you needed to get off the couch and out of your house to socialize.
You had to look up information in encyclopedias
Before the days of Google and Wikipedia, if you wanted information on a particular topic, you would have to look it up in an encyclopedia, listing everything in alphabetical order.
Tinder in real life was a piece of paper
When there was someone you were interested in, in order to ask them out, you needed to either pluck up the courage to ask them out in person, or else pass them a piece of paper with three boxes: check yes, no, or maybe.
Web design was done by spiders
Many jobs did not exist before the internet. Those that were web designers were most likely a spider.
Wasting time in the office was more obvious
It was a lot more obvious if you wanted to look at something other than the work in front of you on the computer . Staring out the window or looking at inspiring pictures on the office walls were far more obvious than they are today.
Posts were made on real walls
If you had an event or information you wanted to share with other people, then you needed to physically print it on a piece of paper and post it on a real wall for others to see.
Mobile games were much simpler
When mobile phones first came out with the ability to play games on them, they were much simpler than they are today. Nokia’s famous snake game became a “game changer” in the world of gaming.
Looking something up took a lot of time and work
As Google and Youtube were not available, if you wanted to learn something you needed to read it in a book. Before the internet, you had to spend hours within a library searching through books to find the information you needed.
Games with more than one player needed a table
Multiplayer games needed to be played on a table, and with the other players in the same room as you! You didn’t have the freedom to play with people from around the world.
Trolls were mythological creatures, not angry opinionated people
Trolls were seen in fantasy films or children’s stories. Today they are people who feel the need to share opinions that would never have been acceptable in public before the internet.
Long-distance communication meant letters, not email
You would get excited when the mailman would come by, hoping that someone sent you a letter.
Selfies required sophisticated technology
If you wanted to take a picture of yourself you needed more sophisticated technology; you needed to get the Gameboy Camera.
Search for movie times in the newspaper
If you wanted to know what time your movie was playing at, you had one place to search for the answer — the newspaper.
Life Before Cell Phones
Being unreachable.
You could leave your house and focus on whatever task or activity you set out to do. No one could reach you or disturb you.
Looking someone up in a phone book was the original Google search
There was a huge book that had everyone’s phone number in it. You needed to look them up to find their number. If you wanted the number for a business, the yellow pages were the original Google.
Having fun outdoors
When not in school or doing chores, kids would be outside playing with each other for hours on end. Parents would send them out themselves and hope that when they were hungry for dinner or lunch they would come home to eat.
Watching TV
You had to watch television shows when they were scheduled to air. This also meant you would have to wait a full week until the next episode aired.
Playing board games with your family
Family time was spent playing board games, many having established designated “game nights” each week. There were lots of different games you could play together. It was a great opportunity to have fun and bond with each other.
Used real cameras
People couldn’t use their phones to take pictures, you needed to use an actual camera.
Used maps or asked someone to get directions
When you went on a trip, you needed to be prepared and bring a physical map with you, or risk being left to constantly ask directions along the way. There was no Google Maps to reference.
Shared unfiltered pictures of yourself
People shared the pictures they took without any editing, emojis, or special filters.
Used payphones
What happened when you were out and needed to call someone? Payphones. On every corner there were public phones, and it cost 25 cents to use.
Memorized people’s phone numbers
Before smartphones, if you wanted to call someone you had to actually know their phone number.
Life Before Social Media
There was a lot less fomo.
Today you are bombarded with everyone else’s pictures of their ever-so-fabulous lives, bringing up the feeling of FOMO, or fear of missing out. But back in the day you weren’t subjected to that unless someone showed you printed pictures of their trip or life.
Not everything had to be photographed
There wasn’t this deep desire to photograph every experience you had or thing you happen to see.
Didn’t search for approval from others
The reason for posting every aspect of your lives is to get approval from others to confirm that you are living correctly. Before the internet there was no way for you to get that kind of immediate, and consistent approval, so no one was searching it out.
Were not subjected to other’s toxic opinions
Once in a while at a family gathering you would be subject to a relative’s unwanted opinion on your life. But with the age of the internet came constant posts or comments in your newsfeed about someone’s toxic opinions daily.
You didn’t have something to waste so many hours of your life
Quickly checking one Youtube video for reference is never as simple as that. Before you know it, 4 hours have passed and you watched 100 videos and found yourself ordering something new on Amazon. Before you know it, half your day has been wasted checking your phone or computer.
Not exposed to such tragedy from around the globe
Global tragedies have always occurred, but they weren’t in your face every moment of the day. Not only do you hear of global horrors as they happen, but there are the tragic images and videos to go along with them.
No constant comparison between yourself and others
Maybe you would be jealous of someone’s hair, figure, or job, but it wasn’t shoved down your throat to see all day, every day.
Not able to spy on others
The ability to stealthily stalk everyone you went to high school with was not as easy as it is today. You would have to sit outside their house to spy on someone — sounds creepy, right?
Life before the internet definitely had its pros and cons. It was a time with more face-to-face interaction and time spent outside of your house. It can enrich your life to incorporate some aspects of these activities and help find a balance between the two worlds.
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Free Essay On Life Before Vs After The Internet
Type of paper: Essay
Topic: Sociology , Communication , Internet , Media , Life , Time , Entertainment , Information
Words: 1000
Published: 02/08/2020
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Internet is considered undoubtedly the most revolutionizing technology ever introduced that has reached the common people in the smallest period of time. Technologies like television and telephone took 20-30 years to be a household name, while Internet took 4-5 years to reach almost every home across the globe regardless of the culture, society or country. Since then Internet has impacted our social and daily life in several ways both positive and negative. It has completely redefined various aspects of our life. This essay will highlight certain aspects of our life that have been completely changed due to internet.
Why People Use Internet
According to a recent research by Pew Internet summarized the stats regarding the common usage of internet among people. The stats showed that almost 92% people use Internet to research and use information, 85% believe that Internet is the best communication channel for all kinds of communication, 75% use internet for business or other transactions and 69% used Internet as a way to entertain. Considering these four major areas of Internet usage the following section will briefly analyze these areas with and without Internet. Internet has impacted and changed almost everything our daily life was made of. People communicate across the globe, take classes remotely, buy as simple as flowers to as expensive product as cars online and running solely online businesses with no traditional shop or office. All this was unimaginable some years ago but is a part of our life.
Information Access
Before Internet research and information retrieval was associated with libraries. The process was tedious and often frustrating as accessing the exact information took hours of searching through books and journals manually. The information retrieval was limited within the areas accessible to a person, often it was hard or impossible to access information from remote areas such as different countries, details like stats , facts and news were hard to keep updated. Internet changed the information research and retrieval completely. It took some clicks to access any information from anywhere in the world. Online repositories and libraries provided everything anyone would want in no time. Secondly, Internet made it possible to access and use the most updated news, stats or facts regarding anything. However, the information available on the internet has to be scrutinized properly to ensure that its genuine unlike the libraries where the information was guaranteed to be genuine.
Communication
The most important and revolutionizing impact of Internet is undoubtedly the way people communicate in everyday life. The current generation cannot imagine their social life without Internet. 10-15 years ago common people would not have thought that all the other communication channels will be replaced with a single technology. Before chat, email and the social networking phones and letters were the common form of communication. Networking and PR meant meeting people and communicating in person, Internet however provided more faster and robust medium of communication between people. The current social networking concept has made people more addicted to internet and isolated from people. According to studies people now prefer communicating through internet more than meeting the same people in person. The communication channels of Internet are faster but have made people isolated socially.
Business & Transaction
Even after Internet was widely accepted, most people stayed away from sharing their financial information online. Before internet medium and small scale businesses had a limited market, audience and visibility. Most of these businesses could not access foreign markets due to time differences between different countries. Traditionally businesses marketed and promoted themselves through print media which could only reach a limited audience. The advent of internet changed the face of business completely. The web presence of businesses gave them a marketing medium to reach the entire world, secondly it allowed anyone to reach them at any time without worrying about the time and geographical location for information. The next generation of online businesses allowed making transactions online for their customers and achieved an always open advantage.
Entertainment
Of all the above aspects Internet has replaced all other forms of entertainment and has actually made all sorts of entertainment available at a single click. Before the Internet people accessed mediums like television and movies for entertainment. Studies show that since Internet has enabled people to access music, movies and programs, people no longer prefer buying these or keeping their favorite selections as in previous times. In addition to this, the new breed of most interactive games available on Internet has revolutionized the way people play games. The readily available entertainment content on the Internet and that too freely has several issues regarding age appropriateness however most of the content is available for anyone anywhere.
Internet has already revolutionized our life and it is expected to change more as the technology is still improving and incorporating more features. To summarize the advent of internet has made many aspects of our daily life more easy and robust, it has provided the medium to do things from the comfort of our homes avoiding unwanted hurdles. While there are more positive effects but Internet has proven to be an addiction for most users especially those in their teenagers and have made them more isolated ,alienated and depressed as compared to other age groups. As it is quoted in the book “The Internet In Everyday Life”,
The Internet is not about technology, it is not about information, it is about
communication – people talking to each other, people exchanging email The Internet is a community of chronic communicators.
Works Cited
Fallows, Deborah. "The Internet and Daily Life." 2004. http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media/Files/Reports/2004/PIP_Internet_and_Daily_Life.pdf.pdf. Wellman, Caroline Haythornthwaite and Barry. THE INTERNET IN EVERYDAY LIFE: AN INTRODUCTION. Backwell Publishers, 2002. http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/everdayintro/Haythornthwaite_Wellman_intro.PDF.
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Innocence lost: what did you do before the internet?
People born in the late 1970s are the last to have grown up without the internet. Social scientists call them the Last of the Innocents. Leah McLaren ponders a time when our attention was allowed to wander
I n moments of digital anxiety I find myself thinking of my father’s desk. Dad was a travelling furniture salesman in the 1980s, a job that served him well in the years before globalisation hobbled the Canadian manufacturing sector. He was out on the road a lot, but when he worked from home he sat in his office, a small windowless study dominated by a large teak desk. There wasn’t much on it – synthetic upholstery swatches, a mug of pens, a lamp, a phone, an ashtray. And yet every day Dad spent hours there, making notes, smoking Craven “A”s, drinking coffee and yakking affably to small-town retailers about shipments of sectional sofas and dinette sets. This is what I find so amazing. That my father – like most other professionals of his generation and generations before him – was able to earn a salary and support our family with little more than a phone and a stack of papers. Just thinking of his desk, the emptiness of it, induces in me a strange disorientation and loneliness. How did he sit there all day, I wonder, without the internet to keep him company?
In this age of uncertainty, predictions have lost value, but here’s an irrefutable one: quite soon, no person on earth will remember what the world was like before the internet. There will be records, of course (stored in the intangibly limitless archive of the cloud), but the actual lived experience of what it was like to think and feel and be human before the emergence of big data will be gone. When that happens, what will be lost?
Earlier this year I travelled to Wilmslow, a suburb of greater Manchester, to interview Elizabeth Denham , the UK’s Information Commissioner and arguably the most empowered data regulator on the planet. Our discussion was wide-ranging, but among the ICO’s projects she was most enthusiastic about was the Age Appropriate Design Code, or Kids’ Code for short, currently in public consultation. An extrapolation of last year’s Data Protection Act, the new code was devised over several months by a tech child welfare dream team composed of the filmmaker Baroness Beeban Kidron , children’s commissioner Anne Longfield and then minister for digital and creative industries Margot James.
The code, which is expected to be laid before parliament this autumn, would completely revolutionise the digital landscape for British children. Among its standards are strict content and design limitations on apps, games and platforms that target minors.
Widely used technologies that nudge or manipulate children through algorithms or intermittent reward systems designed to get and keep their attention would be scrutinised and banned. Instead, the onus would be on tech companies to prove “the best interests of a child as the primary consideration” in any product or platform targeted at the youth market.
When I mentioned to Denham that I grew up entirely without the internet – having sent my first email on the first day of first year university in 1994 – her eyes brightened. “Ah ha!” she said. “So you’re one of the Last of the Innocents.”
What she meant by this is that my population cohort – roughly speaking those born in the mid-to-late 1970s – are the last generation of humans on the planet to have grown up prior to the popularisation of digital culture. Another name for us, coined by the Vancouver writer Michael Harris in his book The End of Absence , is “digital immigrants,” which he defines as those who have lived both “with and without the crowded connectivity of online life.”
Denham’s Kids’ Code is an audacious act – a radical new set of rules that would reimagine the internet as a garden of creativity and knowledge for children, rather than the chaotic circus of unregulated content and dubious corporate interests that characterise its current state. The optimism and daring ambition of her project suggests a question I didn’t think to ask until I was already on the train back from Wilmslow: is it possible to regain innocence lost?
For weeks after meeting Denham, I found myself haunted by the notion of digital immigration and what it means for my generation. I’d always assumed that not being connected as a child had been a handicap – surely it explained why I’m hopeless at figuring out the smart TV remote or programming the digital thermostat. Like most kids I spent idle summer days drifting around our garden spying faces in the clouds, but my childhood (like most kids in the 80s) was also awash in cultural drek. I had way more weekly screen time than my own kids, most of it spent zoning out on bad sitcom reruns and mind-numbing hours playing Pac-Man on our Commodore 64 so our mum – a housewife with no domestic help – could get the next meal on the table. Surely bingeing on the brilliance of Pixar films and the architectural complexities of Minecraft today is a superior way for a child to spend a rainy afternoon?
I began to investigate what it was that marked my generation out – what was the “innocence” lost, if any? I was surprised then to discover many of the neuroscientists, cyber-psychologists and tech ethicists who spend their lives pondering the cultural and moral ramifications of the digital revolution have come to believe that there is something special in my generation, and the recollection of our shared analogue past.
It’s not that digital immigrants are smarter or more talented than the digital natives that came after us. Our uniqueness, it seems, lies in the fact that we are the last of a dying breed and as such, living, breathing receptacles of a soon-to-be lost plane of human experience: empty yawning hours and days of nothing much at all.
“Which would you rather be, extremely poor with loads of friends or super rich with no friends at all?” This hypothetical question was put to me recently out of nowhere by my 11-year-old stepson. For me the answer was easy. “Poor with friends,” I said. “In the long run, loneliness would be worse than poverty.”
My stepson disagreed. “Defo rich with no friends. I’d just stay in my mansion and play Fortnite and watch YouTube and hang out with people online.”
He’s a popular kid and part of a close-knit group of boys who’ve been friends since starting school. When offered a choice of whether they’d like to watch a movie together or spend two hours playing Fortnite and interfacing remotely on headsets, the lads didn’t miss a beat in choosing the latter. This is because, for digital natives like my stepson and his mates, socialising online is the same as – at times even preferable to – socialising in person.
For his 11th birthday he got his first smart phone and it was as if we’d handed him the keys to a magic portal to an idealised parallel universe. I suppose in a way we had. Just as puberty begins to set in, we’d given him a comfort innocents like me and my husband had never known as alienated adolescents: the feeling of being with friends all the time. The absence of aloneness.
For years, scientific debate has raged over whether or not sustained internet use has a deleterious effect on human brain function – particularly on the developing brains of children. The never-ending “screentime debate” has, historically, been heavy on conjecture and light on hard data. But this spring the results of a sweeping international study were published in World Psychiatry , a respected international journal, which may have tipped the balance in favour of digital sceptics. An international team of researchers working with large sample groups in two separate methodologies (MRI brain imaging and behavioural observation), consistently found compelling evidence that prolonged internet use produces both “acute and sustained alterations in specific areas of cognition,” which may reflect long-term changes in the brain, affecting attention span, memory and social interactions.
Dr Joseph Firth, the Manchester-born neuroscientist who led the study told me that while the human brain does seem to interpret online socialising and connection in much the same way as the in-person variety (great news for friendless super-rich shut-ins), other cognitive functions are shown to be weakened. For instance, he said, the brain adapts fairly quickly to treating the internet as a kind of outsourced memory bank, which results over time in the reduction of our own “transactive memory function,” ie the mental sorting processes the brain performs in order to locate and grasp a fact or mental image.
“The problem with the internet,” Firth explained, “is that our brains seem to quickly figure out it’s there – and outsource.” This would be fine if we could rely on the internet for information the same way we rely on, say, the British Library. But what happens when we subconsciously outsource a complex cognitive function to an unreliable online world manipulated by capitalist interests and agents of distortion? “What happens to children born in a world where transactive memory is no longer as widely exercised as a cognitive function?” he asked.
James Williams, a former Google strategist-turned Oxford-trained philosopher and digital ethicist is convinced the loss of solitude we are now experiencing is more than just an end of innocence. His book, Stand Out of our Light , outlines the moral danger of the current “attention economy” in which capitalist interests vie constantly to distract us for their own enrichment. Williams told me that unless we find better ways to regulate and interact with the pernicious distractions of big tech, we risk compromising our personal and collective goals and values, even imperilling our own free will.
“If what we attend to is, in a very real sense, what we are, then what’s at stake in the battle for our attention is nothing less than our ability to determine and pursue the kinds of lives we want to live, both individually and societally,” he said. As someone who, like me, grew up in a world without the internet, Williams worries that we will continue to “conflate entertainment with leisure, resulting in fewer and fewer opportunities for reflection and introspection.”
By resigning ourselves to the frenetic distractions of the attention economy, digital natives like my children and yours risk losing touch with the experience of what it is to be truly alone with their thoughts. Yes, their entertainment is more sophisticated than what we grew up with (what sane person would trade the bounty of Netflix for terrestrial Friends reruns?), but it’s those empty, restless, vaguely melancholic hours, spent staring at clouds and lounging in trees, they’ll miss. Not that they’ll long for what they don’t know. But we will, the innocents, aka the ones who recall the emptiness and boredom. For it’s in those lost hours that we unwittingly got to know ourselves; our imaginations, unbridled, were free to play and laze and wander. And while it was dull and uneventful at times it’s also true that all of humanity’s wonders – including the internet itself – have arisen from this one simple source: a person, a thought, a daydream.
It’s precisely this “loss of lack” Vancouver Michael Harris explores in The End of Absence . His experiments with regaining solitude remind me of my father’s desk: go for a long walk without your phone, he recommends. Spend an afternoon writing in longhand. Read 150 pages in one sitting. Simple in theory, but strangely terrifying in practice.
Like Williams, Harris told me he doesn’t consider himself anti-technology so much as a critical observer of its effects. He points out that all human inventions, even those we consider banal or beneficial, such as cars or books, hijack our brains and disrupt our consciousness. What we risk losing to the emergence of big data is the richness of our interior lives.
“The experience of empty space allows for the growth of imagination and independent thought, the ability to form ideas without being swayed by mass opinion or bot armies,” he said. Moreover, virtual connection impedes our ability to connect and empathise. “When you are inundated with mediated social connectivity it’s increasingly difficult to devote your attention to the people you are actually with.”
More than anything, Harris worries that in future only the privileged few will be able to afford to take regular “digital detoxes” from the exhausting demands of the attention economy. As we talk, I think of my seven-year-old who, for the first time this summer, will fly with me to Ottawa then take a six-hour bus to the wilds of Northern Ontario where he will spend seven nights sleeping in a tent, canoeing and eating freeze-dried food cooked over a camp fire with 30 other kids. He won’t have electricity and plumbing, let alone the internet. I won’t disclose the fees except to say it isn’t cheap to abandon a kid in the woods these days.
The ICO’s Age Appropriate Design Code will be laid before parliament this autumn. If properly implemented and enforced, it may well make the internet a much safer, secure place for generations of British children to come. While it will, in theory, mean a vast improvement, even Denham’s reimagined internet won’t entirely reclaim our pre-digital innocence. No amount of legislating can give us back the absence of before. Which isn’t to say innocence, or some version of it, can’t be regained, through careful daily practice. Like the act of disconnecting our kids and sending them out to play in the garden. Or of sitting, just for an hour, at my father’s empty desk.
Let’s go digital
Key developments that changed the way we communicate. By Hayley Myers
1971: Email Ray Tomlinson was responsible for electronic mail as we know it, choosing the @ sign to connect the username with its destination. Today, it’s estimated there are 3.9 billion email users.
1992: Phone texting British engineer Neil Papworth sent the first SMS – ‘Merry Christmas’ – from his computer to the mobile phone of Vodafone’s Richard Jarvis. Handsets didn’t include keyboards then, so Jarvis was unable to reply.
1997: Chat rooms Talking to friends (and strangers) in chat rooms dominated the late 1990s. The rise of other internet technologies saw their popularity plummet in the following decade, taking the ubiquitous a/s/l abbreviation with it.
2004: Social media Whether a place of meaningful connection, a worrying echo chamber or both, Myspace and its successors created an era where likes, influencers and filters reign supreme – despite recent concerns over privacy and data breaches.
2005: YouTube YouTube’s first ever video, ‘Me At The Zoo’ , was uploaded by the channel’s founder Jawed Karim. It’s since been viewed 73m times, paving the way for cultural moments, such as ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ , skateboarding bulldogs and Justin Bieber.
- The Observer
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As a tool available to a reasonably wide public, the Internet is only twenty years old, but it is already the fundamental catalyst of the broadest based and fastest technological revolution in history . It is the broadest based because over the past two decades its effects have touched upon practically every citizen in the world. And it is the fastest because its mass adoption is swifter than that of any earlier technology.
It is impossible today to imagine the world without the Internet: it enables us to do things which only a few years ago would be unthinkable, and impinges on every sphere of our lives.
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What Was Life Like Before the Internet
By: Author Valerie Forgeard
Posted on Published: July 6, 2022 - Last updated: July 31, 2023
Categories Technology , Culture , History , Society
When you hear that the Internet was invented in 1969, it’s easy to think it’s a relatively recent invention. But when you look at how much our lives have changed since then, especially compared to life before the Internet, it becomes clear how much we’ve evolved over the years.
The Internet is much more than a communication tool; it’s become an integral part of our everyday lives, influencing how we interact with each other, conduct business, and even find love.
The Internet Does More for Us Than We Think
Before the Internet, we used phone books and printed maps. The Internet didn’t exist then. Yellow Pages did exist. Printed maps also existed. Unlike Google Maps, maps back then weren’t digital, searchable, interactive, or dynamic (although they could be personalized for you based on your zip code). You couldn’t get the same map that everyone else had access to unless you bought it in a store.
For example, if you were lost in New York, you had to stop somewhere and look at your map or ask people for directions, hoping they will send you to the right place. Now your cell phone can guide you all the way to your destination! If you were going to be late, you had to find a pay phone or ask someone who had a phone line to advise your host. These days, with constant connectivity, you can just call people from your mobile phone from anywhere.
If you wanted to see photos of someone’s vacation or a new house, you had to wait for them to mail them to you or drop them off in person. And if something happened in the news that interested or intrigued you – like an earthquake or hurricane – you’d to read the paper that week (or watch the local news) when it was reported, instead of going online immediately to get more information as we can now.
Today we can also connect with people from around the world who have similar interests through social media platforms like Facebook or Reddit. And there are also countless educational resources online for anyone seeking knowledge on anything from biology courses taught by college professors at prestigious institutions like Harvard College or Stanford College (both of which offer free online courses) – all while sitting in the comfort of your own home!
There’s Hardly a Time Now When We Haven’t Looked Things Up on the Internet
The Internet is an integral part of our lives. It’s become so much a part of our daily life that we can hardly remember a time when we couldn’t look something up on the Internet. And even though this resource is so present in our lives, we often don’t think about how it helps us.
For example, you may not even realize how much you use the Internet until you don’t have it anymore (and then suddenly realize how much). You may be surprised at what people did before there was an answer engine for every known problem (“How wonderful the times were!”).
The good news is that while there are some negative aspects of technological advancement, technology has had an overall positive impact on many aspects of life.
In the 20th Century, Our Lives Had More Free Time and Fewer Distractions
Before instant messaging, our lives had more downtime and fewer distractions. We didn’t have constant access to an endless amount of information. Instead, we had to meet in person with friends or family and talk about what was going on in the world. That meant people gathered around the dinner table and discussed current events or politics – all without the distraction of their phones.
The Lack of Distractions Also Meant That Our Attention Span Was Much Longer
There were no short entertainments like Instagram stories or YouTube videos competing for your time (although TV was still popular). If you wanted to do one thing, like read a book, it could take months instead of minutes! This focus allowed us to think more deeply about our actions – not just make impulsive decisions based on the dopamine of social media likes and shares.
We also had more time available during the day because we had fewer commitments (no online shopping). All in all, this led to people having more relationships with themselves and each other; these connections were often built through shared interests like sports teams or political movements – not simply through pre-existing social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn groups.
Modern Technology Has Changed Our Lives in Both Positive and Negative Ways
The Internet has changed our lives in both positive and negative ways. The benefits of being connected to the Internet include:
- You’ve access to more information than ever before
- Being able to contact anyone you want, anywhere in the world
- Access to a variety of entertainment options, ranging from games to movies
- People who didn’t grow up with the Internet can sometimes feel left out because of this.
If you didn’t grow up with the Internet, some aspects of modern life may seem foreign to you. For example, many young people today use social media to keep in touch with their friends and family. They can also find information on almost any topic that interests them, whether it’s sports, music, or politics – and they get it all instantly since they don’t have to wait for the mail as their parents did.
While This Is Convenient, Some Older People Feel Left Out Because They Don’t Have Access to These Things
The solution? Many companies are creating companies that cater specifically to older customers who want to store online but aren’t ready for smartphones! There are even apps designed specifically for seniors to help them stay connected with loved ones, keep up to date (e.g., weather apps, news apps), or even track their daily lives (e.g., health apps)
Less Information Was Accessible
At the dawn of the Internet age, finding information was a tedious process. I remember when I was in high school, we had to go to a library and search for books that might’ve contained what we were looking for. And even if you found the book, it mightn’t be there anymore because someone else had checked it out or because no one could remember where they put it.
These days, with Internet access, you can visit the World Book Encyclopedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica to search for a brief history or description of something you need to know. If you need a specific book, you can also buy the actual book on Amazon from your cell phone.
People Had More Undivided Attention for Each Other and for Their Hobbies
Before Internet communication, there were fewer distractions, so people spent more time with family and friends. A young person was more likely to be more present in the moment when being with others than spend time on his mobile phone. We were also better able to focus on their hobbies and passions because there was less temptation to use technology as an escape from boredom or unfulfilling activities (like chatting on social media).
Communities Were Local
The first thing you should keep in mind is that people in the pre-Internet era lived in smaller communities. If you grew up in a small town or suburb of a big city, you probably knew all your neighbors by name and what they looked like.
We also had more opportunities to interact with them in our daily life- at school, at church, or walking down the street. That meant people were much more engaged in their communities.
Not only were many people connected in person, but they also became more engaged in their communities as soon as they got home from work or school because there was no internet waiting for them at home! Instead of looking at memes about cats on Facebook (or another popular social media platform at the time), we participated directly in our local events and news through organizations like PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations) or VFWs (Veterans of Foreign Wars).
We Consumed Less
The amount we can consume on the internet is endless. Here are some examples of what’s changed since the World Wide Web:
- We consume less information.
- We consume fewer products and services
- We consumed less entertainment
- We were less traveled
Before the Internet, people had limited access to information about travel. They didn’t have as many options for transportation and lodging as we do today.
We used our imaginations more often because we didn’t have an abundance of visual stimuli available 24/7 like we do today with social media and video games. We’d to use our brains or read books to create images in our minds from words and descriptions from other sources (like books).
We Lived More in the Present Moment
Before the Internet, we had to be more patient and mindful of our surroundings and the people around us. We had to pay attention to what was happening around us at every moment because there was no way we could scroll through our smartphones or turn on a social media platform every second of the day and see what was going on in another part of the world. Constant connectivity has changed our behavior.
This meant that while our lives became more demanding, they also became more rewarding because it forced us to appreciate our surroundings and the people around us even more.
In a world where things are constantly changing, it’s hard enough to stay focused on a task – but staying focused while having access to modern technology makes that task even harder!
The Internet has given us so many wonderful things, but it’s also changed some things in our lives that we’ll never get back. The world isn’t as small anymore, and we can’t get as much information from a book or newspaper as we used to. Most people don’t even know how to use a phone book anymore!
Social Media Is Not What Killed the Web
Better browsers made things worse.
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“Was the internet really this bad?” I wondered to myself as I read the September 1995 issue of The Atlantic . I was reading the issue in digital form, displayed on Netscape Navigator 3 on a mid-’90s Macintosh. Or, at least, on a software version of the browser and Mac provided on the website OldWeb.Today . The site houses an emulator that connects to the Internet Archive’s record of websites, providing a full computing experience of the World Wide Web of three decades ago.
That experience was the badness I was pondering. Not the magazine itself—which began publishing online with this issue, whose cover story asked “ How Lincoln Might Have Dealt With Abortion ”—but the way I was reading it. The article page looked awful: The nameplate was strangely positioned, and the text was hard to read. Resizing the browser window fixed the layout, but my eyes and brain still struggled to process the words. I was alive and online that fall 29 years ago, but in my memory the web was magical, like a portal into a new way of life—not a clunky mess like this. Now, having had the chance to travel back in time, I wonder if the clunkiness wasn’t in its way a midwife to that wonder.
Sometime in late 1994, a friend of mine opened a program called Mosaic in the basement computer lab at the university library. “You’ve got to see this,” he said as he started typing in akebono.stanford.edu. A gray page loaded with “Yahoo” printed at the top of a bullet list of blue links. Nothing special, but I was impressed: The World Wide Web was still new, and finding anything of use was difficult. This new, playfully named website offered a directory of sites by category—computers, politics, entertainment, and so forth.
Read: Yahoo, the destroyer
Now, using the OldWeb emulator, I’d been transported back into this era: 1995 to 1996. I didn’t know where to go on the web back then—Google wouldn’t arrive for another few years—so I returned to primeval Yahoo for help. Poking through this directory anew, I visited a website on film and television careers, where I took in an interview with the prop master David Touster (the most exciting part of his job: “the pleasure of creating a vision with creative people”). I visited a webzine about gender equality, illustrated with loosely rendered, line-drawing figures that, I recalled, were a bit of an aesthetic at the time. I visited a site called WebEthics.com to see how the early internet thought about online dangers. The biggest one turned out to be money. Commercial websites should disclose their purpose, Web Ethics said. There was a list of websites that failed to do this, called the Dirty Dozen. The top entry, a site called All Business Network, was accused of being a stealth infomercial. No. 2 read “Coming soon,” and the other 10 slots were blank.
This is how the internet felt back then: promising but empty. Nobody says surfing the web anymore, but at the time the phrase made sense as a description of the lugubrious, often frustrating task of finding entertainment. A visitor online felt like a beach bum waiting to catch a wave. ( Channel surfing described a similar vibe one got from watching television.) A lot would change in the years that followed. For one thing, much to the chagrin of the operators of WebEthics.com, the internet quickly commercialized. But even then, “content,” as we call it today, was rare. You might read an article or visit a brochure-ware website for a car or a vacuum, or even purchase a book at Amazon. What you wouldn’t do was spend your whole day online.
Connectivity was one reason. The library computer lab was connected via high-speed Ethernet, but home use still monopolized the phone line as bits were eked out slowly from a modem. Wi-Fi wasn’t yet widely available, and a computer was a place you had to go in the house. Using the OldWeb emulator on my laptop, I recalled how much we used to rely on the status bar at the bottom of the window (now mostly retired) for updates on the process of loading a webpage, and on the little browsing animation—Netscape’s was a view of shooting stars—for distraction while we waited. Online life was mostly waiting.
Because every click brought more delay, one clicked more deliberately. Browsers displayed visited links in a different color (purple by default, instead of blue). They still do this, but nobody cares anymore; using the OldWeb browser reminded me that those purple links helped you navigate a strange and arduous terrain. Yes, that’s where I meant to go , or Nope, already been there .
Once you reached your destination, you’d be confronted with a series of distractions. Screens were small back then, with low-resolution text and graphics. On The Atlantic ’s old website, the type was small and pixelated. Italics were not truly semicursive, with curved letterforms, but slanted versions of roman. Lines of text ran most of the way across the screen without a break. In order to read an entire article using Netscape in Macintosh System 7, I had to interrupt myself repeatedly to click the scroll-bar button. These minor glitches may have worn away our capacity to focus. But we had no idea how much worse that problem could become.
Much has been made of the ways in which social-media sites made internet life compulsive and all-consuming. Web search and shopping, too, have turned people’s data into ads, leading them to spend ever-greater quantities of time and money online. But my OldWeb visit revealed to me that the manufacturers of computer devices and their basic software made this transformation possible. Instagram or Google would have been compelling on the old internet, but they’re surely more so now, seen on bright displays with the pixel density of a printed magazine. Before the web was good—before PCs were good—one had trouble spending hours just in Word or Excel. That may have been a blessing.
It’s easy to portray the websites and browsers on OldWeb.Today as primitive, early steps along an evolutionary path. But at least some of what hadn’t yet been figured out about the web simply wasn’t worth pursuing. The World Wide Web of the 1990s was a place you went into for a little while until it spat you out. As an activity, it had an end—which came when someone needed the phone, when your eyestrain overcame your interest, when the virtual ocean failed to spawn a wave worth surfing. Now the internet goes on forever.
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Life before Internet versus Life after Internet
Long ago before the introduction of internet facilities, many operations were being handled manually. For instance, a company had to keep its records manually by writing down their sales, annual profits, payments to their employees among other things in their books. Generally, this activity was tedious but the organizations had to adapt to the situation since they had no better alternative of handling their operations.
Communication was also very slow before the introduction of internet. This meant that people had to send their messages via post offices which were generally slow. Emergency could never be attended to since the messages send via post offices were delivered late than expected. Further, in the olden days, people were forced to send messages to their friends and relatives by word of mouth. For instance, if a person was travelling from one place to another, say from town to upcountry, he or she was sent to deliver some messages verbally. This kind of message delivery was not reliable since the information given stood many chances of being distorted. Message given from the first person was not the same as the one delivered by a second party.
Education provided to the learners at the olden days cannot be compared to the one availed to modern learners. In the past, there was few research materials that could enable students come up with various solutions to the problems.
Introduction of internet to most parts in the world have really changed many lives. Fast communications have been achieved. A person intending to send a message to the recipients end does so within a short while, say two minutes. This has enhanced reliability and hence people can respond to an emergency as soon as possible. Ways of communicating using internet includes use of live chats, use of e mails among others.
Many students, lecturers/ instructors, and researchers have benefited from the use of internet facilities. It is much easier to obtain relevant information needed from the internet facility compared to literally researching it in the libraries. Organizations are also among the beneficiaries of the internet facilities. Use of modern internet has allowed them to keep accurate records on their day in day out operations. Companies have been in a position to use minimum resources for maximum returns.
In conclusion, it is quite evident that introduction of internet facilities have improved the lives of many. Despite little explicit content such as the pornographic materials, internet is still a place to be. Parents should guide their children on morality so as to ensure that they use the facility wisely.
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Sample Essay on Life Before and After the Internet
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The internet began in the 20 th century and served as a great innovation that altered life of most individuals . The internet is a system of computers that enhances communication via electronics that are connected. Since it was innovated, the internet has brought changes to the lives of people.
However, there has been a controversial argument on whether the internet has positive or negative effects to people’s lives. In my opinion, I believe that life during the internet era is better in contrast to the times when there was no internet. The positive impact of internet in society is that it has enabled the youth to upgrade their self esteem (Morton, 67). They accomplish this when they interact with their colleagues and formulate relationships that are supportive. Furthermore, through the internet, individuals tend to make new friends on a daily basis .
However, these activities did not exist when there was no internet. Furthermore, before the internet, friendships could not develop. The economic sector has benefited a lot from the internet . For instance, this has generated the aspect of Ecommerce and facilitated its operation. Evidently, the internet boosts improved communication in a business between sellers and clients. It also speeds the supply of goods and enhances efficiency in a firm. Conversely, before the internet, there was delay in delivery of goods. After the internet was invented, it developed the availability and quality of products. In addition, the internet fostered diversity which was required in choosing goods and details. This is evident through the websites that offers price contrasts to facilitate exchange of finances.
Another benefit of the internet is that it offers digital study platform . For instance, learners tend to subject their assignments through emails. Furthermore, students can submit their course materials via the internet. It has also improved the manner in which learners communicate with their faculty. This implies that life after the internet is more enjoyable and easy in contrast to the days when there was no internet.
Works Cited
Collin, et al. Social Networking Services. Sydney: YAW-CRC, 2010.
Morton, Fiona S. “Consumer Benefit from Use of the Internet.” National Bureau of
Economic Research 6. (2006): 67-90.
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The Case for Marrying an Older Man
A woman’s life is all work and little rest. an age gap relationship can help..
In the summer, in the south of France, my husband and I like to play, rather badly, the lottery. We take long, scorching walks to the village — gratuitous beauty, gratuitous heat — kicking up dust and languid debates over how we’d spend such an influx. I purchase scratch-offs, jackpot tickets, scraping the former with euro coins in restaurants too fine for that. I never cash them in, nor do I check the winning numbers. For I already won something like the lotto, with its gifts and its curses, when he married me.
He is ten years older than I am. I chose him on purpose, not by chance. As far as life decisions go, on balance, I recommend it.
When I was 20 and a junior at Harvard College, a series of great ironies began to mock me. I could study all I wanted, prove myself as exceptional as I liked, and still my fiercest advantage remained so universal it deflated my other plans. My youth. The newness of my face and body. Compellingly effortless; cruelly fleeting. I shared it with the average, idle young woman shrugging down the street. The thought, when it descended on me, jolted my perspective, the way a falling leaf can make you look up: I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early.
So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.
I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence. Each time I reconsidered the project, it struck me as more reasonable. Why ignore our youth when it amounted to a superpower? Why assume the burdens of womanhood, its too-quick-to-vanish upper hand, but not its brief benefits at least? Perhaps it came easier to avoid the topic wholesale than to accept that women really do have a tragically short window of power, and reason enough to take advantage of that fact while they can. As for me, I liked history, Victorian novels, knew of imminent female pitfalls from all the books I’d read: vampiric boyfriends; labor, at the office and in the hospital, expected simultaneously; a decline in status as we aged, like a looming eclipse. I’d have disliked being called calculating, but I had, like all women, a calculator in my head. I thought it silly to ignore its answers when they pointed to an unfairness for which we really ought to have been preparing.
I was competitive by nature, an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (Great American novel; email job). A little Bovarist , frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened. I resented the callow boys in my class, who lusted after a particular, socially sanctioned type on campus: thin and sexless, emotionally detached and socially connected, the opposite of me. Restless one Saturday night, I slipped on a red dress and snuck into a graduate-school event, coiling an HDMI cord around my wrist as proof of some technical duty. I danced. I drank for free, until one of the organizers asked me to leave. I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later. A second one, where I discovered he was a person, potentially my favorite kind: funny, clear-eyed, brilliant, on intimate terms with the universe.
I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies. Not him. In those early days, I spoke fondly of my family, stocked the fridge with his favorite pasta, folded his clothes more neatly than I ever have since. I wrote his mother a thank-you note for hosting me in his native France, something befitting a daughter-in-law. It worked; I meant it. After graduation and my fellowship at Oxford, I stayed in Europe for his career and married him at 23.
Of course I just fell in love. Romances have a setting; I had only intervened to place myself well. Mainly, I spotted the precise trouble of being a woman ahead of time, tried to surf it instead of letting it drown me on principle. I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal , and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.
The reception of a particular age-gap relationship depends on its obviousness. The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one? Would I take it? He is older. Income rises with age, so we assume he has money, at least relative to her; at minimum, more connections and experience. She has supple skin. Energy. Sex. Maybe she gets a Birkin. Maybe he gets a baby long after his prime. The sight of their entwined hands throws a lucid light on the calculations each of us makes, in love, to varying degrees of denial. You could get married in the most romantic place in the world, like I did, and you would still have to sign a contract.
Twenty and 30 is not like 30 and 40; some freshness to my features back then, some clumsiness in my bearing, warped our decade, in the eyes of others, to an uncrossable gulf. Perhaps this explains the anger we felt directed at us at the start of our relationship. People seemed to take us very, very personally. I recall a hellish car ride with a friend of his who began to castigate me in the backseat, in tones so low that only I could hear him. He told me, You wanted a rich boyfriend. You chased and snuck into parties . He spared me the insult of gold digger, but he drew, with other words, the outline for it. Most offended were the single older women, my husband’s classmates. They discussed me in the bathroom at parties when I was in the stall. What does he see in her? What do they talk about? They were concerned about me. They wielded their concern like a bludgeon. They paraphrased without meaning to my favorite line from Nabokov’s Lolita : “You took advantage of my disadvantage,” suspecting me of some weakness he in turn mined. It did not disturb them, so much, to consider that all relationships were trades. The trouble was the trade I’d made struck them as a bad one.
The truth is you can fall in love with someone for all sorts of reasons, tiny transactions, pluses and minuses, whose sum is your affection for each other, your loyalty, your commitment. The way someone picks up your favorite croissant. Their habit of listening hard. What they do for you on your anniversary and your reciprocal gesture, wrapped thoughtfully. The serenity they inspire; your happiness, enlivening it. When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.
When I think of same-age, same-stage relationships, what I tend to picture is a woman who is doing too much for too little.
I’m 27 now, and most women my age have “partners.” These days, girls become partners quite young. A partner is supposed to be a modern answer to the oppression of marriage, the terrible feeling of someone looming over you, head of a household to which you can only ever be the neck. Necks are vulnerable. The problem with a partner, however, is if you’re equal in all things, you compromise in all things. And men are too skilled at taking .
There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.
I find a post on Reddit where five thousand men try to define “ a woman’s touch .” They describe raised flower beds, blankets, photographs of their loved ones, not hers, sprouting on the mantel overnight. Candles, coasters, side tables. Someone remembering to take lint out of the dryer. To give compliments. I wonder what these women are getting back. I imagine them like Cinderella’s mice, scurrying around, their sole proof of life their contributions to a more central character. On occasion I meet a nice couple, who grew up together. They know each other with a fraternalism tender and alien to me. But I think of all my friends who failed at this, were failed at this, and I think, No, absolutely not, too risky . Riskier, sometimes, than an age gap.
My younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. By his age, I had long since wisened up. He leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. His towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. His lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. She is capable beyond words. Statistically, they will not end up together. He moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. She picked out his couch. I will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl. If they break up, she will never see that couch again, and he will forget its story. I tell her when I visit because I like her, though I get in trouble for it: You shouldn’t do so much for him, not for someone who is not stuck with you, not for any boy, not even for my wonderful brother.
Too much work had left my husband, by 30, jaded and uninspired. He’d burned out — but I could reenchant things. I danced at restaurants when they played a song I liked. I turned grocery shopping into an adventure, pleased by what I provided. Ambitious, hungry, he needed someone smart enough to sustain his interest, but flexible enough in her habits to build them around his hours. I could. I do: read myself occupied, make myself free, materialize beside him when he calls for me. In exchange, I left a lucrative but deadening spreadsheet job to write full-time, without having to live like a writer. I learned to cook, a little, and decorate, somewhat poorly. Mostly I get to read, to walk central London and Miami and think in delicious circles, to work hard, when necessary, for free, and write stories for far less than minimum wage when I tally all the hours I take to write them.
At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self, couldn’t imagine doing it in tandem with someone, two raw lumps of clay trying to mold one another and only sullying things worse. I’d go on dates with boys my age and leave with the impression they were telling me not about themselves but some person who didn’t exist yet and on whom I was meant to bet regardless. My husband struck me instead as so finished, formed. Analyzable for compatibility. He bore the traces of other women who’d improved him, small but crucial basics like use a coaster ; listen, don’t give advice. Young egos mellow into patience and generosity.
My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did. Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on. I moved into his flat, onto his level, drag and drop, cleaner thrice a week, bills automatic. By opting out of partnership in my 20s, I granted myself a kind of compartmentalized, liberating selfishness none of my friends have managed. I am the work in progress, the party we worry about, a surprising dominance. When I searched for my first job, at 21, we combined our efforts, for my sake. He had wisdom to impart, contacts with whom he arranged coffees; we spent an afternoon, laughing, drawing up earnest lists of my pros and cons (highly sociable; sloppy math). Meanwhile, I took calls from a dear friend who had a boyfriend her age. Both savagely ambitious, hyperclose and entwined in each other’s projects. If each was a start-up , the other was the first hire, an intense dedication I found riveting. Yet every time she called me, I hung up with the distinct feeling that too much was happening at the same time: both learning to please a boss; to forge more adult relationships with their families; to pay bills and taxes and hang prints on the wall. Neither had any advice to give and certainly no stability. I pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling toward every milestone.
I don’t fool myself. My marriage has its cons. There are only so many times one can say “thank you” — for splendid scenes, fine dinners — before the phrase starts to grate. I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him. He doesn’t have to hold it over my head. It just floats there, complicating usual shorthands to explain dissatisfaction like, You aren’t being supportive lately . It’s a Frenchism to say, “Take a decision,” and from time to time I joke: from whom? Occasionally I find myself in some fabulous country at some fabulous party and I think what a long way I have traveled, like a lucky cloud, and it is frightening to think of oneself as vapor.
Mostly I worry that if he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive, but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials, the way Renaissance painters hid in their paintings their faces among a crowd. I wonder if when they looked at their paintings, they saw their own faces first. But this is the wrong question, if our aim is happiness. Like the other question on which I’m expected to dwell: Who is in charge, the man who drives or the woman who put him there so she could enjoy herself? I sit in the car, in the painting it would have taken me a corporate job and 20 years to paint alone, and my concern over who has the upper hand becomes as distant as the horizon, the one he and I made so wide for me.
To be a woman is to race against the clock, in several ways, until there is nothing left to be but run ragged.
We try to put it off, but it will hit us at some point: that we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone. A woman at 20 rarely has to earn her welcome; a boy at 20 will be turned away at the door. A woman at 30 may find a younger woman has taken her seat; a man at 30 will have invited her. I think back to the women in the bathroom, my husband’s classmates. What was my relationship if not an inconvertible sign of this unfairness? What was I doing, in marrying older, if not endorsing it? I had taken advantage of their disadvantage. I had preempted my own. After all, principled women are meant to defy unfairness, to show some integrity or denial, not plan around it, like I had. These were driven women, successful, beautiful, capable. I merely possessed the one thing they had already lost. In getting ahead of the problem, had I pushed them down? If I hadn’t, would it really have made any difference?
When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins. I have a friend, in her late 20s, who wears a mood ring; these days it is often red, flickering in the air like a siren when she explains her predicament to me. She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one. The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does. If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty? There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were fated for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.
For me, my relationship, with its age gap, has alleviated this rush , permitted me to massage the clock, shift its hands to my benefit. Very soon, we will decide to have children, and I don’t panic over last gasps of fun, because I took so many big breaths of it early: on the holidays of someone who had worked a decade longer than I had, in beautiful places when I was young and beautiful, a symmetry I recommend. If such a thing as maternal energy exists, mine was never depleted. I spent the last nearly seven years supported more than I support and I am still not as old as my husband was when he met me. When I have a child, I will expect more help from him than I would if he were younger, for what does professional tenure earn you if not the right to set more limits on work demands — or, if not, to secure some child care, at the very least? When I return to work after maternal upheaval, he will aid me, as he’s always had, with his ability to put himself aside, as younger men are rarely able.
Above all, the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write. A chance at a destiny that doesn’t adhere rigidly to the routines and timelines of men, but lends itself instead to roomy accommodation, to the very fluidity Betty Friedan dreamed of in 1963 in The Feminine Mystique , but we’ve largely forgotten: some career or style of life that “permits year-to-year variation — a full-time paid job in one community, part-time in another, exercise of the professional skill in serious volunteer work or a period of study during pregnancy or early motherhood when a full-time job is not feasible.” Some things are just not feasible in our current structures. Somewhere along the way we stopped admitting that, and all we did was make women feel like personal failures. I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing. Perhaps men long for this in their own way. Actually I am sure of that.
Once, when we first fell in love, I put my head in his lap on a long car ride; I remember his hands on my face, the sun, the twisting turns of a mountain road, surprising and not surprising us like our romance, and his voice, telling me that it was his biggest regret that I was so young, he feared he would lose me. Last week, we looked back at old photos and agreed we’d given each other our respective best years. Sometimes real equality is not so obvious, sometimes it takes turns, sometimes it takes almost a decade to reveal itself.
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AT&T says a data breach leaked millions of customers’ information online. Were you affected?
FILE - The sign in front of an AT&T retail store is seen in Miami, July 18, 2019. The theft of sensitive information belonging to millions of AT&T’s current and former customers has been recently discovered online, the telecommunications giant said Saturday, March 30, 2024. In an announcement addressing the data breach, AT&T said that a dataset found on the dark web contains information including some Social Security numbers and passcodes for about 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million former account holders. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File)
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NEW YORK (AP) — The theft of sensitive information belonging to millions of AT&T’s current and former customers has been recently discovered online, the telecommunications giant said this weekend.
In a Saturday announcement addressing the data breach, AT&T said that a dataset found on the “dark web” contains information including some Social Security numbers and passcodes for about 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million former account holders.
Whether the data “originated from AT&T or one of its vendors” is still unknown, the Dallas-based company noted — adding that it had launched an investigation into the incident. AT&T has also begun notifying customers whose personal information was compromised.
Here’s what you need to know.
WHAT INFORMATION WAS COMPROMISED IN THIS BREACH?
Although varying by each customer and account, AT&T says that information involved in this breach included Social Security numbers and passcodes — which, unlike passwords, are numerical PINS that are typically four digits long.
Full names, email addresses, mailing address, phone numbers, dates of birth and AT&T account numbers may have also been compromised. The impacted data is from 2019 or earlier and does not appear to include financial information or call history, the company said.
HOW DO I KNOW IF I WAS AFFECTED?
Consumers impacted by this breach should be receiving an email or letter directly from AT&T about the incident. The email notices began going out on Saturday, an AT&T spokesperson confirmed to The Associated Press.
WHAT ACTION HAS AT&T TAKEN?
Beyond these notifications, AT&T said that it had already reset the passcodes of current users. The company added that it would pay for credit monitoring services where applicable.
AT&T also said that it “launched a robust investigation” with internal and external cybersecurity experts to investigate the situation further.
HAS AT&T SEEN DATA BREACHES LIKE THIS BEFORE?
AT&T has seen several data breaches that range in size and impact over the years .
While the company says the data in this latest breach surfaced on a hacking forum nearly two weeks ago, it closely resembles a similar breach that surfaced in 2021 but which AT&T never acknowledged, cybersecurity researcher Troy Hunt told the AP Saturday.
“If they assess this and they made the wrong call on it, and we’ve had a course of years pass without them being able to notify impacted customers,” then it’s likely the company will soon face class action lawsuits, said Hunt, founder of an Australia-based website that warns people when their personal information has been exposed.
A spokesperson for AT&T declined to comment further when asked about these similarities Sunday.
HOW CAN I PROTECT MYSELF GOING FORWARD?
Avoiding data breaches entirely can be tricky in our ever-digitized world, but consumers can take some steps to help protect themselves going forward.
The basics include creating hard-to-guess passwords and using multifactor authentication when possible. If you receive a notice about a breach, it’s good idea to change your password and monitor account activity for any suspicious transactions. You’ll also want to visit a company’s official website for reliable contact information — as scammers sometimes try to take advantage of news like data breaches to gain your trust through look-alike phishing emails or phone calls.
In addition, the Federal Trade Commission notes that nationwide credit bureaus — such as Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — offer free credit freezes and fraud alerts that consumers can set up to help protect themselves from identity theft and other malicious activity.
AP Reporter Matt O’Brien contributed to this report from Providence, Rhode Island.
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NEW YORK (AP) — The theft of sensitive information belonging to millions of AT&T's current and former customers has been recently discovered online, the telecommunications giant said this weekend.. In a Saturday announcement addressing the data breach, AT&T said that a dataset found on the "dark web" contains information including some Social Security numbers and passcodes for about 7. ...