Difference between revisions of "Group 1: More The Same (as Daniel's allocated)"

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The inter-Not in year 2015
The Internet has continued to change the world at a steady pace for the last ten years, although not as rapidly as some people believed.


The internet is changing the world??? This is a fallacy just like the Y2K bug
'''''Effects on the quality of life'''''


'''''Effect on the quality of life'''''
The Internet is a tool that has helped the sharing of information, but the grunt of work is still done by humans.  The processor speed has increased to the current standard of 128 gigahertz per second and most PCs have about 16 gigabytes of memory. After a long battle, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)'s 128-bit PC platform is now the market leader, but Intel continues the battle.  Although there are significant advancements in technology, the average work week has actually increased to 50 hours.  With the expensive capital expenditures in newer computer platforms, companies are expecting more from their employees to compensate for the investment in technology. 


The internet is a tool that has helped the sharing of information, but the grunt of work is still done by humans.  The processor speed has increased to 50 gigahertz per second and most PCs have over 1000 gigabytes of memory.  Although there are significant advancements in technology, the average work week has actually increased to 50 hours.  With the capital expenditure in newer computer platforms, companies are expecting more from their employees to compensate for the large outflow of money.
Portable computing devices, such as PDAs and Blackberrys, are losing popularity because executives were having difficulty drawing the line between work and home.  Being able to answer emails immediately did not seem worth the loss of personal time and privacy.  In addition, the stress of receiving emails during dinner time and on vacations led to an increase in work-related depression.


Technology, such as PDAs and Blackberrys, are returned to the companies since executive were having difficulty drawing the line between work and home.  Being able to answer emails immediately did not seem worth the loss of personal time and privacy.  The stress of receiving emails during dinner time and on vacations had increased work-related depression.
The expectations of the Internet bringing wide spread changes to the way of life did not materialise for many inter-related reasons. They are as follows:


The expectations of the wide spread changes that the internet would bring did not materialize because
- The economy took too long to come out of the recession, which started at the turn of the century.  Corporations were not able to supply enough cash flow to facilitate the R&D required for technology.  Investors grew weary of the growth potential of the technology firms, such as computer component manufacturers and application developers.  This led to a shift of capital to more reputable companies in more stable industries, such as utilities and consumer goods.


- The economy taking to long to come out of the recession that started at the turn of the century did not supply enough cash flow to facilitate the R&D into technology.  Investors grow weary of the variability in the returns of the growth stocks, such as computer hardware and application developer, leading to a shift of capital to more stable industries such as utilities and consumer goods.
- Large corporations that were searching for efficiencies started outsourcing many services to lower wage countries.  Under pressure from lobby groups and labour unions, the government implemented policies to keep jobs in the westernised nations and mitigate the discrepancy between the social classes.  This along with the privacy risk within emerging countries slowed the pace of technological advancement.


- Large corporations faced pressure for outsourcing services to lower wage countries. But the privacy risk of the emerging countries and the strong resistance of labour forces in the developed countries, caused political intervention to make shift work abroad more difficult.
- Globalisation had taken its toll on society.  Many nations put pressure on authorities to protect their cultural identity. There was continuous debate how to address this issue and the source of the problem, which could be attributed to many areas such as the World Wide Web, migration and inter-racial relations.


- Limitations of software – algorithms that is used in most programming language reached their borders.  Computer applications are not able to deal with the complexity to solve the problems that require human adaptability.  Some characteristics are not able to convert into a variable that can be defined such as time and situation circumstances, much of the grey area that mangers have to use their judgment.
- Algorithms that are used in programming language reached their limits.  Computer applications are not able to deal with the complexity to solve the problems that require human logical and reasoning.  Computer code was not able to convert subjective variables in the programs, such as time and effect on humans.  These situation circumstances are the grey areas that still require humans to use their judgment.


- Companies reduce the employee access to the internet after analyzing the personal use during business hours and realize that productivity is significantly hampered by this constant distraction.  Although the product availability is vast in 2015, consumers prefer not to use their personal time to searching for products, which has disappointing results for online retailers.
- Companies reduce their employees’ access to the Internet after analysing their productivity.  The initial benefits of information availability did not outweigh the costs of personal use and constant distraction during work.  This had a negative effect on e-commerce, because consumers were not online as much as anticipated. Although the product availability had increased substantially by 2015, the actual number of purchases experienced a gradual decline.
 
- Tensions that rise due to the European Union to reduce differences to promote strength, mainly through the use of the Euro currency, has negative effects on the issue of globalization.  The lost of cultural identity become major area of debate.




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'''''E-Business'''''
'''''E-Business'''''


The number of purchases conducted on the web has significantly decreased due to the high amounts of unauthorized transactions. Credit cards companies that initially protected customers for transactions that the goods were not received or not as expected.  But due to the high costs of this form of insurance, customers are left to use their own discretion when buying products online.
Another thing that has been growing at a nice pace for the last ten years, but without the extremes everyone seemed to expect back in 2005, is internet transactions. Both consumers and businesses have indeed increased their spending on goods through the internet; the total B2B e-commerce market is now at almost $4 trillion, while the consumer market has reached almost $500 billion.


Another thing that has been growing at a nice pace for the last ten years, but without the extremes everyone seemed to expect back in 2005, is internet transactions. Both consumers and businesses have indeed increased their spending on goods through the internet; the total B2B e-commerce market is now at almost $4 trillion, while the consumer market has reached almost $500 billion.
This growth has come mostly from the increase in so-called web services, where applications are able to communicate directly with each other in areas such as inventory control, security checks and travel services. In short, these systems act as chains of interlinked services, such that if one system triggers an event to another system via an XML message, the receiving system treats the trigger according to its own rules. For instance, when Dell’s inventory levels of XRAM chips run below the re-order point, Dell’s SAP system orders a new shipment of chips from Samsung’s Taipei II plant automatically, and a report is made by a similar XML call to the Mozilla mail server.
This growth has come mostly from the increase in so-called web services, where applications are able to communicate directly with each other in areas such as inventory control, security checks and travel services. In short, these systems act as chains of interlinked services, such that if one system triggers an event to another system via an XML message, the receiving system treats the trigger according to its own rules. For instance, when Dell’s inventory levels of XRAM chips run below the re-order point, Dell’s SAP system orders a new shipment of chips from Samsung’s Taipei II plant automatically, and a report is made by a similar XML call to the Mozilla mail server.
The main reasons the growth has not been stronger, as it was expected to reach this level ten years ago by optimists in the early 2000’s, has mainly been security concerns and the social needs for interaction, especially in the B2C market. The security concerns were the main reason Microsoft lost its grip on the web browser software back in 2006, when Mozilla Firefox took over as the dominant browser. With a stronger focus on security, Firefox, originally released in 2004 as open-source software, gave users a solution to their fear of being cheated when buying goods on the internet. Firefox’s three-way verification and escrow service (in co-operation with PayPal) proved a very solid solution to most security issues regarding misuse of credit information.
 
The main reasons the growth has not been stronger, as it was expected to reach this level ten years ago by optimists in the early 2000’s, has mainly been security concerns and the social needs for interaction, especially in the B2C market. The security concerns were the main reason Microsoft lost its grip on the web browser software back in 2006, when Mozilla Firefox took over as the dominant browser. With a stronger focus on security, Firefox, originally released in 2004 as open-source software, gave users a solution to their fear of being cheated when buying goods on the internet. Firefox’s three-way verification and escrow service (in co-operation with PayPal) proved a very solid solution to most security issues regarding misuse of credit information. In addition, the stronger security focus from the major card companies such as Visa and MasterCard (with Visa's Verified by Visa iniative as the primer) also has helped the trend.
 
The social need for interaction has however acted as a balancing loop in the trend of increasing e-commerce. It has become more and more evident that human beings have a need for interaction also when it comes to e-commerce. Long believed to be negligible in importance, scientists were amazed to discover that the need to see, feel and negotiate products in real life was strong also with the younger generations. An issue that was raised by labor unions, job preservation through real life interaction was also a hot topic a few years back. However, it seems the social interaction patterns themselves were stronger than these arguments.
The social need for interaction has however acted as a balancing loop in the trend of increasing e-commerce. It has become more and more evident that human beings have a need for interaction also when it comes to e-commerce. Long believed to be negligible in importance, scientists were amazed to discover that the need to see, feel and negotiate products in real life was strong also with the younger generations. An issue that was raised by labor unions, job preservation through real life interaction was also a hot topic a few years back. However, it seems the social interaction patterns themselves were stronger than these arguments.


 
Another reason that was oft mentioned together with the two above ones, the issue of transparency and comparison between different offers has increasingly been solved by such software as Google’s PriceFinder. The PriceFinder allows the user to use Google’s familiar search language to make expression for searching the internet for similar offers and create a report with recommendations. Initially flawed, the recommendations are now reported to be of high quality, and users seem to enjoy using it.


'''''Education'''''
'''''Education'''''


Internet did not change the education patterns as it was expected. The increase of Internet usage and the potential as an education tool created the whole bunch of services and applications to develop courses and learning content.  Some of these contents were done without any pedagogic criteria, and the ones that were developed under strict educational rules did not show any significant results in improving the education process. Some of the Internet education tools were useful and got certain impact as helping tool to the traditional educational methods, but any of the e-learning materials was able to substitute the traditional way of teaching neither in the school nor in the University. Moreover, the new degrees based on Internet, that quickly expanded during the beginning of the 2000, were not accepted by the companies nor the administration as a competitive degrees, as they were perceived a cheap and easy studies with little practical experience. Therefore, most of the students that followed this type of education were disappointed, as they could hardly find a job in their field due to the poor recognition of their degree. The bad reputation quickly expanded over the prospects candidates, and they realized the little pay off of following this type of the degrees. In 2015, there was almost not companies offering e-learning, most of them were bankrupt.
The Internet did not change education patterns as anticipated. The applications developed did not have adequate learning content and did not show any improvement in the educational process. Although the Internet became a helpful tool in the pedagogical methods, it did not become a substitute for the traditional teaching approaches.  The initial reasons for introducing the Internet in the classroom was the availability of scientific, medical, and historical information. The students were found to use the web for immoral activities, such as visiting pornographical sites and racial hate chat rooms.
 
As of 2005, there were about 8 billion Web pages, which multiplied for many years. The Internet was considered a vast uncatalogued library. Search engines, such as Lycos and Infoseek, only focused on a small fraction of the net. Literature was found to be of low quality in terms of its literary value as only approximately 8% of journals and books were available on the Internet. In addition, the majority of the literature requires the user to subscribe for a ridiculous fee. The lack of control of the content and difficulty in policing the students are the main reasons why the Internet is not a significant instrument in the education system.
 
'''''Effects of emerging countries'''''
 
Conflict of interests on Internet between emerging countries and development strain the advancement of the internet. In 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held in Tunis hosted by the Government of Tunisia resulted in breakdown between emerging countries, such as China, Brazil and African countries, and developed countries, such as the U.S.A, European countries, Canada, Australia and Japan. They could not agree on Internet governance. The emerging countries claim that political administration should be controlled not by ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which is a non-profit corporation and is located in California in the U.S.A, but by intergovernmental organization such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), implying that emerging countries want to control of Internet while trying to strip it from the U.S.A. On the contrary, developed countries claimed that private-sector-driven scheme should be continued because that is more flexible and efficient to organize than governmental scheme, implying that developed countries want to keep continue current situation since Internet business is developing well from their perspectives.
In 2009, Internet governance by ICANN affected by the U.S.A government increased their power in terms of technology as well as politics. Then number of Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation for emerging market was reduced which resulted in restrain of launch of web page originated emerging market. Generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management was controlled in favor of developed countries. Although the fund, so called “Digital Joint Fund”, had been discussed for long time in order to cover cost of Internet prevalence in emerging countries, this fund had not realized because of the strong objection by developed countries.  
In 2014, conventional media such as radio and TV remained as major role to provide information in emerging countries. In some countries such as China, freedom of press on the Internet was regulated as it was in 2005. This added up to strain of development of Internet in emerging countries. As a result, while Internet was popularized more in developed countries than it was in 2005, it was not in emerging countries.
 


''''' The control of Internet '''''
In terms of higher education, the online degrees programs, which had flourished in the last century, were not valued as much by corporations in the recruiting of staff.  Most of the graduates of these programmes did not secure good positions, which had a negative impact on enrollment.  By 2015, there are very few institutions offering e-learning and the traditional university in-class lectures are still the main source of a high quality post secondary education.


The control of internet by governments, which had been expected to increase dramatically because of its use for terrorist purposes, has never taken off. As a matter of fact,  the international and national terrorism which had seen its pick in the beginning of the third millennium, started to have less appeal among people thanks to three different factors:


- A strong decrease in the discrepancy between social classes in countries;
'''''Effects of Emerging Countries on the Advancement of the Internet'''''
- A change in the political and military policy towards countries with oil deposits;
-      A lack of money to fund terrorism;


The decrease in the discrepancy between social classes was the result of both the reverse trend in outsourcing mentioned above, and the national will to maintain a right balance between globalization and cultural identity. These trends lead to a situation where local job markets were no-more threatened by low-wage countries, and therefore, they could experience more stability.
Conflicts of interest between emerging and developed countries strain the advancement of the Internet. In 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held by the Government of Tunisia resulted in breakdown between emerging countries, such as China, Brazil, and African countries, and developed countries, such as the U.S.A, European countries, Canada, Australia and Japan. The main area of disagreement was the issue of Internet governance. The emerging countries claim that political administration should be controlled by the intergovernmental organisation, International Telecommunication Union (ITU).  But the US wants it under the jurisdiction of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is a non-profit entity located in California.  The developed nations claimed that private sector driven scheme should be continued because that is more efficient to organise, which was the main reason to tip the scales in their favour.
Initially, the number of IP addresses increased in the emerging markets, but the political situation of the US hindered the full proliferation.  The government uses its power to influence the ICANN to help with its agendas, which was in the best interest of American citizens.  This came at a cost of the expansion of the Internet into China and India. From the ICANN’s inception many of the planned initiatives were abandoned, such as the Digital Joint Fund which was intended to cover cost of Internet infrastructure in emerging countries.  The Generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management became a means of regulating the Internet in favour of developed countries’.  


The change in the political and military policy towards countries with oil deposits, was mainly due to the fact that by 2010 the use of hydrogen as a source of energy became a reality. As a consequence, the world lost its interest in countries rich of oil deposits. These countries, and their inhabitants, stopped to feel controlled and  manipulated by the most developed countries. The Arabic countries for example, which had been funding the international terrorism, lost their main source of revenues, and they had not more money, and interest, to go on with their terrorism sponsoring activity.
In 2015, as a result of the above conflict between emerging and developed countries, conventional media such as radio and TV remained as major providers of information in emerging countries. As a result, the Internet was more prevalent in the developed countries than that of the emerging nations.

Latest revision as of 01:47, 12 January 2005

The Internet has continued to change the world at a steady pace for the last ten years, although not as rapidly as some people believed.

Effects on the quality of life

The Internet is a tool that has helped the sharing of information, but the grunt of work is still done by humans. The processor speed has increased to the current standard of 128 gigahertz per second and most PCs have about 16 gigabytes of memory. After a long battle, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)'s 128-bit PC platform is now the market leader, but Intel continues the battle. Although there are significant advancements in technology, the average work week has actually increased to 50 hours. With the expensive capital expenditures in newer computer platforms, companies are expecting more from their employees to compensate for the investment in technology.

Portable computing devices, such as PDAs and Blackberrys, are losing popularity because executives were having difficulty drawing the line between work and home. Being able to answer emails immediately did not seem worth the loss of personal time and privacy. In addition, the stress of receiving emails during dinner time and on vacations led to an increase in work-related depression.

The expectations of the Internet bringing wide spread changes to the way of life did not materialise for many inter-related reasons. They are as follows:

- The economy took too long to come out of the recession, which started at the turn of the century. Corporations were not able to supply enough cash flow to facilitate the R&D required for technology. Investors grew weary of the growth potential of the technology firms, such as computer component manufacturers and application developers. This led to a shift of capital to more reputable companies in more stable industries, such as utilities and consumer goods.

- Large corporations that were searching for efficiencies started outsourcing many services to lower wage countries. Under pressure from lobby groups and labour unions, the government implemented policies to keep jobs in the westernised nations and mitigate the discrepancy between the social classes. This along with the privacy risk within emerging countries slowed the pace of technological advancement.

- Globalisation had taken its toll on society. Many nations put pressure on authorities to protect their cultural identity. There was continuous debate how to address this issue and the source of the problem, which could be attributed to many areas such as the World Wide Web, migration and inter-racial relations.

- Algorithms that are used in programming language reached their limits. Computer applications are not able to deal with the complexity to solve the problems that require human logical and reasoning. Computer code was not able to convert subjective variables in the programs, such as time and effect on humans. These situation circumstances are the grey areas that still require humans to use their judgment.

- Companies reduce their employees’ access to the Internet after analysing their productivity. The initial benefits of information availability did not outweigh the costs of personal use and constant distraction during work. This had a negative effect on e-commerce, because consumers were not online as much as anticipated. Although the product availability had increased substantially by 2015, the actual number of purchases experienced a gradual decline.


E-Business

Another thing that has been growing at a nice pace for the last ten years, but without the extremes everyone seemed to expect back in 2005, is internet transactions. Both consumers and businesses have indeed increased their spending on goods through the internet; the total B2B e-commerce market is now at almost $4 trillion, while the consumer market has reached almost $500 billion.

This growth has come mostly from the increase in so-called web services, where applications are able to communicate directly with each other in areas such as inventory control, security checks and travel services. In short, these systems act as chains of interlinked services, such that if one system triggers an event to another system via an XML message, the receiving system treats the trigger according to its own rules. For instance, when Dell’s inventory levels of XRAM chips run below the re-order point, Dell’s SAP system orders a new shipment of chips from Samsung’s Taipei II plant automatically, and a report is made by a similar XML call to the Mozilla mail server.

The main reasons the growth has not been stronger, as it was expected to reach this level ten years ago by optimists in the early 2000’s, has mainly been security concerns and the social needs for interaction, especially in the B2C market. The security concerns were the main reason Microsoft lost its grip on the web browser software back in 2006, when Mozilla Firefox took over as the dominant browser. With a stronger focus on security, Firefox, originally released in 2004 as open-source software, gave users a solution to their fear of being cheated when buying goods on the internet. Firefox’s three-way verification and escrow service (in co-operation with PayPal) proved a very solid solution to most security issues regarding misuse of credit information. In addition, the stronger security focus from the major card companies such as Visa and MasterCard (with Visa's Verified by Visa iniative as the primer) also has helped the trend.

The social need for interaction has however acted as a balancing loop in the trend of increasing e-commerce. It has become more and more evident that human beings have a need for interaction also when it comes to e-commerce. Long believed to be negligible in importance, scientists were amazed to discover that the need to see, feel and negotiate products in real life was strong also with the younger generations. An issue that was raised by labor unions, job preservation through real life interaction was also a hot topic a few years back. However, it seems the social interaction patterns themselves were stronger than these arguments.

Another reason that was oft mentioned together with the two above ones, the issue of transparency and comparison between different offers has increasingly been solved by such software as Google’s PriceFinder. The PriceFinder allows the user to use Google’s familiar search language to make expression for searching the internet for similar offers and create a report with recommendations. Initially flawed, the recommendations are now reported to be of high quality, and users seem to enjoy using it.


Education

The Internet did not change education patterns as anticipated. The applications developed did not have adequate learning content and did not show any improvement in the educational process. Although the Internet became a helpful tool in the pedagogical methods, it did not become a substitute for the traditional teaching approaches. The initial reasons for introducing the Internet in the classroom was the availability of scientific, medical, and historical information. The students were found to use the web for immoral activities, such as visiting pornographical sites and racial hate chat rooms. As of 2005, there were about 8 billion Web pages, which multiplied for many years. The Internet was considered a vast uncatalogued library. Search engines, such as Lycos and Infoseek, only focused on a small fraction of the net. Literature was found to be of low quality in terms of its literary value as only approximately 8% of journals and books were available on the Internet. In addition, the majority of the literature requires the user to subscribe for a ridiculous fee. The lack of control of the content and difficulty in policing the students are the main reasons why the Internet is not a significant instrument in the education system.

In terms of higher education, the online degrees programs, which had flourished in the last century, were not valued as much by corporations in the recruiting of staff. Most of the graduates of these programmes did not secure good positions, which had a negative impact on enrollment. By 2015, there are very few institutions offering e-learning and the traditional university in-class lectures are still the main source of a high quality post secondary education.


Effects of Emerging Countries on the Advancement of the Internet

Conflicts of interest between emerging and developed countries strain the advancement of the Internet. In 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held by the Government of Tunisia resulted in breakdown between emerging countries, such as China, Brazil, and African countries, and developed countries, such as the U.S.A, European countries, Canada, Australia and Japan. The main area of disagreement was the issue of Internet governance. The emerging countries claim that political administration should be controlled by the intergovernmental organisation, International Telecommunication Union (ITU). But the US wants it under the jurisdiction of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is a non-profit entity located in California. The developed nations claimed that private sector driven scheme should be continued because that is more efficient to organise, which was the main reason to tip the scales in their favour. Initially, the number of IP addresses increased in the emerging markets, but the political situation of the US hindered the full proliferation. The government uses its power to influence the ICANN to help with its agendas, which was in the best interest of American citizens. This came at a cost of the expansion of the Internet into China and India. From the ICANN’s inception many of the planned initiatives were abandoned, such as the Digital Joint Fund which was intended to cover cost of Internet infrastructure in emerging countries. The Generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management became a means of regulating the Internet in favour of developed countries’.

In 2015, as a result of the above conflict between emerging and developed countries, conventional media such as radio and TV remained as major providers of information in emerging countries. As a result, the Internet was more prevalent in the developed countries than that of the emerging nations.

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