Interconnections of Thousands of Different Networks

    Nowadays, everybody tries hard to improve his or her knowledge about information technology. The Government also lays emphasis on carrying out an educational policy with information technology for students. From all of these, we can find out how important information technology is and how useful it will be when we use it in a correct way.
    The Internet is the most famous computer network that's ever been built. It is an interconnection of thousands of different networks. The main task of the network is to transmit data and there are three major services offered by the Internet: the most popular one is E-mail. The others are news and World Wide Web (WWW).
    Some people may say that, all these services can be replaced by the traditional methods. However, when we compare E-mail with the traditional service, we know without doubt that using E-mail brings lots of benefits to us. The price is the same, whether you send mail to China or America. It is cheaper than traditional services. Moreover, messages sent by E-mail can be a text, file, or pictures. A student can get his papers corrected by a teacher from an other country just by sending them E-mail .We are able to do our studies from around the world. Each one can check his mail from any computer connected to the net and we doesn't have to check his mailbox at home or stay at home to receive his calls.
    In the Internet we can search for different kinds of information. But when you have some questions, what would you do? I think the other service of the Internet can help. We can ask it in a newsgroup and many of the subscribers can give us a relevant answer. This newsgroup is well organized with in a particular subject and we can always receive first-hand information. We can also take part in many discussion we are interested in exchanging our views on different topics.
    While these two are popular, I think, the most important is the World Wide Web. It has led to a real explosion of the Internet and a revolution in cyberspace. It is a distributed multimedia network. All this information is inter-linked and relocated. Each user can put his own pages on the Internet and make them known to millions of other users. It allows us to save time and make a copy of those files that have been posted overseas. We can also find free software that might be useful for us.
    Furthermore, through the Internet, friendship can lead to strong lifelong relationships and even marriage as the distance between people has been shortened. We can also try to change our personality and take on an invented one. Its fun to experience and understand personalities and lifestyles that we can never try in real life but in cyberspace. The Internet also increased the number of high-technology companies.
    However, everything has its own problems and can bring harm. Firstly, we do not have direct means to verify the truthfulness of the information. For instance, playing ICQ, we always receive many message forwarded by someone and are asked to forward it again. But when we forward it that means more people would be involved. If the message is wrong, how can we ensure it doesn't cause problems? Also, the Internet can also have a bad influence on youth and culture because there are a lot of web servers and newsgroups dealing with sex pornography and violence.
    In conclusion although information technology has its problems, I think it brings more benefit than harm to human lives when it is used in a correct way. So, to maximize the benefit of using the Internet, we should learn how to use it and the government should educate the public generally about it.

Alice Kong S. 7A (17)