By STEVE STAEGER

Senior Reporter

The World Wide Web is becoming a world of its own. Inside the endless sequences of HTML code lies there is a universe that is becoming just as realistic as the physical world. The Internet is quickly becoming as essential to our lives as the air we breathe and the water we drink.

A Web site that tracks Internet statistics around the world estimates that 1.3 billion people, or approximately 20 percent of the world’s population, use the Internet worldwide.

In the United States, 215 million people, approximately 71 percent of the population, were estimated as users of the Internet as of November of last year.

The Internet has made it possible to talk to people around the world in a matter of seconds, buy anything you would like with the click of a mouse or find any information you may need without, even opening a book.

But with the new conveniences come new risks and dangers. Still, for many, the advantages of such a powerful tool are too important to lose.

INSTANT INFORMATION

Freshman Scott Manosky sees no disadvantages with the Internet becoming a bigger part of lifestyle.

“It makes everything faster and knowledge spreads faster,” Manosky said. “In the old days, it used to take forever for news and events to spread around but now it’s a snap of a finger type thing.”

The most prominent feature of the growth of the Web is the expansion of information available. Search engine statistics show that people “google” things 91 million times a day, and nearly 3 billion times a month.

Boutell.com estimates that just last year, the Internet was home to approximately 108 million distinct Websites, with an estimated 29.7 billion individual Web pages in cyberspace.

With so much information out there, it’s hard to tell what is true or false.

One factual debacle is Wikipedia, the Web phenomenon where users can create and edit encyclopedia entries.

According to Wikipedia’s Web site, it grew by 30 million words in July 2006 alone.

“A sleepless fast reader could never catch up with Wikipedia’s new content,” boasts Wikipedia’s statistics page. “By the time they were done, so much would have changed with the parts they had already read that they would have to start over.”

Over 2 million articles currently exist on the English version of the site with 207 million edits to those articles, averaging 16 per article. Critics of the site claim that its open-editing platform makes Wikipedia an unreliable source for factual information.

“Wikipedia is a change in how we as a society conceptualize information,” said Catheryn Cheal, assistant Vice President for e-learning and instructional support at Oakland University.

“Wikipedia is a good metaphor for the post-modern view of simultaneous, ambiguous and multiple truths, since Wikipedia is constructed by the crowd who change and edit and add new viewpoints in a never-ending process,” said Cheal.

A study by scholarly journal “Nature” in 2005 sent articles from each source to relevant experts in different fields and compared Wikipedia with Encyclopedia Britannica.

The study concluded that while Britannica had an average of two errors per article, Wikipedia only had three per article.

With such a small amount of inaccuracies, is the online encyclopedia a good choice?

“You need to be conscious of what type of truth you are looking for, to see whether or not you want to use Wikipedia as a source,” said Cheal. “It’s best to use multiple sources and consciously consider who is producing the information and who they are producing it for.”

Sophomore Liz Trygstad believes that most of the facts on the Internet are accurate and said it is her most common way of research.  

“You can just look up any problems or anything you’re thinking about. You can just go online and find it all out,” Trygstad said.

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

But for Trygstad, sometimes being able to find it all can be pretty dangerous.

“I can’t help but be worried about privacy,” Trygstad said. “Anybody can go online and find out where I live, what my phone number is, and so much more.”

The Federal Trade Commission reports that just last year, instances of identity theft totaled 250,000. The amount of money lost totaled $1.1 billion, with the average loss per person near $500.

Identity theft has become such a problem that President George W. Bush assigned a task force to work specifically on the issue. The task force even set up a Web site that suggests only using companies you know when making transactions online, regularly updating and using anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewall software, protecting passwords and backing up important files.

Yet privacy issues extend beyond identity theft with the advent of social networking. Internet crime bureaus at police stations are buzzing with concerns of parents and teenagers alike. MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites have provided more opportunities for sexual predators.

Statistics say that one in 33 youth received an aggressive sexual solicitation in the past year.

MySpace has responded by devoting nearly one third of its workforce to monitoring the site on a 24-hour basis in 2006.  The company instituted new policies to restrict the age range of users to 14 and over and deleted over 250,000 accounts of children under 14 in the first month.

“Because the Internet is wide open with possibilities for good, it also exposes opportunities for negative use. This is true of all new technologies,” said professor Janna Anderson of Elon University, who helped piece together the Pew Future of the Internet Survey.

“For instance, when the automobile was invented, people were blessed with a positive tool that could also be used for nefarious purposes,” Anderson added. “The automobile is responsible for the deaths of 40,000 – 50,000 people a year in the U.S. alone.”

Anderson thinks the Internet and social networking are pretty safe by comparison.

COMMUNICATION BREAK-THROUGH OR BREAKDOWN?

The advent of social networking and instant messaging has changed the way the world communicates.

Senior Brian Kallou has his worries.

“You can do almost anything on your computer,” said Kallou. “People don’t communicate face-to-face anymore and it brings a lot of problems when it comes to social standards.”

Beth Talbert, a special instructor in OU’s communication department expresses the same concern.

“The biggest influence the Internet has had on communication is that people now need to constantly be in touch with each other,” Talbert said. “People now spend whatever free and alone time they have communicating with each other. There is no time for personal reflection, and people sometimes need that alone time.”

The method of Internet communication restricts intangibles that society can gain from normal communication.

“Sixty percent of the communicating we do in person is actually done non-verbally,” said Talbert, who teaches a class specifically on non-verbal communication.

Overall, Talbert believes that communication is not being harmed by the Internet.

“I really think that communication is a generational thing,” Talbert said. “People are always going to think their way of communication is best, but they all work.”

However, according to a study conducted on technology and society, Internet

use at home has a strong negative impact on time spent with friends and family, as well as time spent on socia

l activities.

FUTURE OF THE SUPERHIGHWAY

The Pew Internet and American Life Project cond

ucted a survey of experts in 2005 and 66 percent of them predicted a devastating attack on the United States’ Internet infrastructure in the next 10 years.

“This is the biggest vulnerability to Western lifestyles,” said Kate Carruthers, one of the experts polled in the survey. “But the growth of grid computing may mitigate the risk to networked information infrastructure. The weak link remains power generation.”

Eleven percent of experts disagreed with the prediction.

“It’s way too decentralized for that,” said Fred Hapgood, who is an expert as well.

Fifty-nine percent agreed with a prediction that more government and business surveillance will occur as computing devices proliferate and become embedded in appliances, cars, phones, and even clothes. Fifty-six percent of them agreed that, as telecommunications expand, the boundary between work and leisure will diminish and family dynamics will change because of that.

The possibilities for the Internet — good or bad — are endless.

Anderson thinks the Internet is a great tool but reminds users of an overlooked aspect.

“Those of us who use the Internet daily without giving it much thought should be thankful for the people behind the scenes who are making a difference every day through the work they do to continue to help the Internet evolve as a tool for global good,” she said.