The Future of the Internet

The world would go into meltdown without the internet; it controls everything now so what will it be like in the future?

The digital landscape is fast evolving. In just a few decades, the internet has gone from initially automating information between scientists at CERN to a worldwide phenomenon with up to around 2.5 billion users. This has increased by a sensational amount in just 15 years! When I was born in 1997, there was barely any technology compared to how much there is now. People used to have very low quality equipment to use the internet and it would often take ages for anything to load. This has rapidly changed with the advent of fibre optic broadband where pages load within a matter of seconds.

My personal favourite use for the internet is gaming: I love playing the PlayStation, using games such as Fifa and Call of Duty. They are two of the biggest games on the market and they are linked with the internet so that you can play online with your friends or anyone around the world in multiplayer mode.

There has been a rapid growth which has no signs of slowing down. With the world’s population increasing, the future for the internet is going to be massive. In another few decades everything could be internet based. Magazines and newspapers are fast becoming a thing of the past, instead we have online news and different websites which can provide animations to go that one step further than a magazine could ever do. I am 18 years old and I have only read around 10 newspapers in my life. I have always found quicker ways of finding news such as the internet or the television. In my opinion, it will not be long until newspapers become extinct and everything will be online.

The internet has many uses such as:

• Health-related information
• Business
• Research
• Shopping
• Banking
• Job searches
• Travel
• Social Media

Most of the time, I do my shopping online – it is easier and less time consuming. The items are delivered to my door and I never need to leave the sofa, what more could I want? It is perfect and this is why I believe shopping will become completely internet based.

Social network users spend on average around 3 hours per day on social networking sites such as ‘Twitter’, ‘Facebook’ and ‘Youtube’. This shows how dependent people are becoming on the internet as a large majority of their day is spent online. Every app on my iPhone requires the internet in order for it to function correctly. This just shows that without the internet, my phone is essentially useless for anything other than calling and texting people. When you think that this is originally the only thing mobile phones used to be able to do, why is it so strange to me when I have no access to the internet?

Here at mso, we all use the internet throughout the entire day. Everything we do is web based except for phone calls. We could not exist without the internet as we depend on it entirely. I asked some of my colleagues what their first memory of the internet was and here is what they had to say:

Amy Chubb – “Not being able to use the phone at the same time as somebody being on the Internet – if you dared to pick up the phone you would get that awful screeching noise in your ear! And finding out what ASL and LOL stood for” (Age 9 in 1998).

Carly James – “Being at my cousin’s house, hearing that awful dial up sound and then ‘Welcome to AOL’” (Age 10 in 1998).

Chris Vesey – “Going to meet some girls we chatted up on a chat forum using a modem. Dating sites didn’t have pictures, big mistake!” (Age 20 in 1996).

James Wood – “Using the internet so my teachers couldn’t ring my house after school / MSN Messenger” (Age 9).

Maryse Borges – “At uni, we used Netscape Navigator! That was a beauty! In France before that, we had the Minitel, which was plugged in the phone line and you could search for phone numbers and see other basic pages in black and white!” (Age 20 in 1996).

Nicola Purdie – “Being beaten up and chucked off the computer by my brother so he could use the internet instead and picking up the phone to hear the dial up noise” (Age 10 in 1996)

Sarah Lyons – “Rushing home from school to login to AOL chat and then having my mum call my Aunty on the landline, cut my dial up connection and her telephone conversation being projected out of the computer speakers… perfect spy setup.” (Age 13 in 2001).

Simon Hooker – “Going to an “internet cafe” and trying to load up a picture of Buzz Lightyear. By the time it was time to go, only half of his head had loaded.” (Age 11 in 1995).

My own first memory of using the internet was MSN messenger and trying to webcam chat all my friends on there (Age 11 in 2008).

I find it incredible how I grew up with some of this technology which I would never use now, yet people older than me never even had technology like that when they were my age.

The internet is only going to become a more integral part of people’s everyday life. As a result of this, a lot of companies will have to adapt if they haven’t already. People will either need to accept the way the world is heading and embrace it, or they can struggle by not joining the digital revolution.

The internet is the future.