The Internet is a virtual trove of treasured information with all types of data, images, and videos available at your fingertips. This information can be both advantageous and disadvantageous to users.
Advantages
- Communication: Keeping in touch with friends and family has never been easier using email, social networking sites, chat room, and IM.
- Services: Online banking, making reservations, shopping, seeking a job, and looking for advice are easy to do with 24/7 convenience.
- Download: The Internet offers opportunities to download for free music, games, videos, and other entertainment software.
- Chat: Community forums, chat rooms, and other groups are available to make new friends and meet people that share your interests.
- Entertainment: Missed your favorite program or want to hear about celebrity gossip, the Internet has sites available to check out the latest.
- E-Commerce: Do you need to maneuver commercial goods or transact business deals? The Internet allows for the transfer information across the world.
Disadvantages
- Theft: Personal information and other pertinent information can be obtained via the Internet from profiles and places your shop making it a breeding ground for identity thieves.
- Immorality: Thousands of sites with pornography and other immoral materials in the form of text, pictures, and video are readily available. They can easily be found by unsupervised children using the Internet.
- Spam: Using email can generate bulk amounts of unsolicited information to your inbox. It serves no purpose but to clog up the system and spread viruses.
- Infection: If you are not careful about the sites you visit and the information you download, then you have a higher potential of having your system infected with viruses, spyware, and other malicious types of malware.
- Filtration: Make too broad a search query using your search engine and a large number of hits are displayed making it difficult to filter out information.
- Accuracy: Not all information available on the Internet is correct and authentic.
- Time Waster: The Internet can become addicting with people taking time away from the important things to instead chat, surf, or play games.
