Weekly Blog Post 2

It is interesting to see how far the Internet has come. In just over two decades, Internet usage has spread over an estimated quarter of the Earth's population according to Wikipedia. That's over 1,673,007,569 human-beings sharing information, learning, and communicating over the Web. To most, the Internet is considered to be one of the best inventions our world has seen, but does this technology serve us more bad than good?

As shown by the video "The Machine is Us/ing Us", when you connect to the Internet you receive access to millions of websites. One of the most common uses of the Internet is communication. Internet users communicate through many means such as instant messengers, blogs, and on profiles such as Facebook. While these sites serve as a perfect way to express yourself and connect with others, the location of this communication makes it very hard to determine audience. Even with security settings on your profile, it is very easy for someone to "backdoor" your "secure" information. Therefore, anything and everything that you write on the Web is available to any of the 1,673,007,569 users of the Internet today. This makes it very hard to pinpoint who exactly is reading your latest blog or status update. Just last year, the US Department of Defense was forced to prohibit flash drives on military computers due to a worm virus threatening security. Hackers were sending this virus in hopes of retrieving military intelligence through a virus that lived on flash drives. While the Internet serves as a place to communicate with foreign countries and allies, who is to know that there isn't someone else watching as well. Privacy and audience issues are a few of the bad aspects of the Internet.

This is just one of many things that writers need to be aware of when expressing themselves on the Internet. While the video "The Machine is Us/ing Us" makes the Internet look so vast, amazing, and useful, it can also cause problems. As a writer and user of the Internet you have to keep in mind that something so powerful has these downfalls and be prepared for as many as possible. It is very difficult as a writer to know how the medium or context that you use may be perceived. Being careful, while still being ourselves, is how writing over the Internet should be.