Political Growth

The Government

All websites with the .gov ending to the domain name are government websites. These websites help to inform the public of what is happening within governments as well as bring countries together.

The information provided to the public through these websites are highly useful and is much faster than the previous method of writing a letter to your closest MP. The websites can provide information about useful links to other websites that will answer your questions, maintenance in your area and what will be happening soon within the government.

Younger generation and Elections

A main part of what happens in the government is the elections that take place. The internet allows for a wider range of campaigning. Getting yourself on a social networking site such as Facebook brings the information of the government to a higher amount of generations and putting it right in the face of the most impressionable of all, Young adults.

Where those in their 30-70’s have had decades to learn what happens in government those of us who are still in that 18-25 bracket have probably not been that informed on how politics really works and the younger generation have grown up with the internet and seek information through the internet rather than with newspapers of watching the 6 o clock news. So popular media sites such as Facebook or Myspace allow for political parties to get there face out there in the public eye and put a positive spin on the thing they want to do in their party. With much larger coverage it obviously then leads to more votes!

Online Petitions

Online petitions cover a much wider area of people that that of normal petitions reaching areas of people that we never even consider. Where a normal petition would reach the town of the issue, those who care about the issue but are only vaguely related e.g. they drive through the area every day and it will affect them without them living there or even stopping there suddenly have the ability to get involved from home without having to seek it out.

So when the number of signatures turns from hundreds to thousands it is difficult to ignore and the government realises that something small at the very least needs to change. These petitions can be made massive with the use of social networking sites.

The growth of the internet means that more people care about the news and are willingly getting involved with politics.

Technological Growth

The Technology on the internet is rapidly growing to a point where it’s beginning to provide you with things you never even knew you wanted till they gave it to you. This growth in technology has made out life much easier and allows for extra security of things on cloud storage and being able to access all your information no matter where you are on a wireless device.

Cloud Storage

Large companies such as windows live SkyDrive offer free storage for all your documents on the internet. The data you decide to keep there is put into virtual lockers that you can go in and out of whenever you like as long as you have an internet connection.

Advantages

• All online, with all your information saved on the internet you don’t have to make backup copies onto anything like a pen drive or cd’s or an external hard drive. You can get to everything and you know it’s safe. Plus it’s not taking up physical space in your office. It might be ok as an individual because everything might fit onto one or two external hard drives. For the average person it just saves a lot of time but for a company it would take hundreds of hard drives to keep copies of all their different databases etc.

• Easy Access, with cloud storage transportation becomes the easiest thing in the world. No need to carry it with you because all you have to do is log in online and you have everything you need sat right in front of you.   

• Price, the price is right! For the average person using cloud storage the 100GB free that most service providers give is more than enough and you never need to upgrade to the £3.50 of whatever the tariff per month to have more space.

Disadvantages

• Security, having everything backed up is great; you’re not going to lose anything theoretically. However it leaves all your information and files in the hands of the service provider. Should for some reason it gets wiped all your information is gone and it’s a lot easier to hack into information saved in cloud storage than into your computer itself. So perhaps it only ok if what your saving in there is simply family photos but anything you care about the rest of the world seeing is best to be kept on your own computer behind password etc.

• Time, so it saves time instead of backing it up but because you’re doing it over the internet rather than onto a removable storage space it could take longer to upload and download information.

Packet switching

Packet switching is the sending of packets of data in digital networking used for communication. The internet is of course the most popular place that uses packet switching.  The way packet switching works is by dividing the data into separate package so that every letter is sent separately. The separate packages can take completely different routes to get to the destination and after all of the packages from the same message get to the desired destination they are reassembled into the correct order.
Packet switching of course helps in the process of protecting information as it is sent across the internet because the data has been divided into separate parts. The contribution this has to the internet is massively substantial because we are able to send personal details across the internet without the worry that their information will get stolen and used in identity theft etc.

Domain Names

IP addresses are unrecognisable to humans and we would find it difficult to remember them. The system of the domain naming system is hierarchical for computers and translates the domain name into an IP address saving us a lot of hassle

The point of domain names is that we all remember what the name of our favourite clothing brand or can remember a word that they want to visit the website of. And can easily remember hundreds of website domain names because they are exactly the same as the name of the shop etc. e.g. Newlook.com where we would only be able to remember a handful of 12 digit IP addresses that to us appear to be simply a random set of numbers.

Mobile devices

The ability to connect to the internet anywhere is most obviously one of the biggest key developments to the growth of the internet. The use of wireless also allows for areas at home and work to be less crowded. So not the entire internet connected devices need to be in the same room because they all need to be attached to the same router. They can be spaced out across a large room or in separate rooms as long as they are within reach of the wireless connection.

The use of wireless has expanded massively in the last few years and has spread from just laptops, IPhones, smart phone and iPod etc. A problem though is that with loads of people attaching to the same wireless network they are all sharing the same router so space on the bandwidth is stretched making the internet on each device run slower. This however can be fixed by buying faster internet although this can be expensive.

This ability to always connect to the internet has made the use of internet by the average person grow massively because we use it all the time rather than just when we get home. We use it to check our emails constantly throughout the day as well as on transport when bored etc.

Academic Growth

Features are popping up all over the internet that help towards being able to use is as a permenant source of information and research material. With these resources hitting the internet it's lowering the need to use books and developing the way we can go through our education giving us more option about how we want to learn. 

Online Encylclopedias/ Academic search engines

Google scholar gives all internet browsers access to articles, case studies and technical reports whether they be a digital or physical copy. Below shows google scholar in action. As you can see 'Plato has been searched for and different results have appeared below the search. These results are not just those which you would find on the regular google but are tailored to academic research etc. The results shown are first: A book written by Plato himself and second a case study written by Plato.

On the same note of resources on the internet wiki's such as wikipidea and Catawiki provide an excellent and expansive source of information available to us. These wiki's may be written by the average person, so could be argued to be unreliable. It is found that they are frequently updates by other members who specialise in that particular field, so are kept at a reasonable standard.

VLE’s

Virtual learning environments such as Moodle establishes a relationship between pupils and teachers because teachers can put pieces of work and study tools onto it that the student can access them. This would mean that after a lesson a teacher could post the presentation they gave in the lesson and a summary sheet. Allowing Pupils to make notes in there own time and maximise their use of the lesson.

However this can cause a problem because children feel like they are expected to use the online resources rather than ask the teacher outside of school hours. This can mean that the student actually accomplishes less in the hour slot for the lesson, and can leave them feeling confused about what they are meant to be doing.

Digital libraries

Currently there is only one digital library available at the moment (Kindle) but they are currently being created all over the world. These libraries mean we don’t have to leave our on home or carry a physical book. It can be argued that this could cause problems with getting old documents onto the internet.

Plus if someone has collected an entire series of books and then they get a kindle, they might prefer to complete the set rather than buy/borrow it from a digital library.

Google scholar do have some free reports that we can access on a loan basis, so can be used as a sort of library.

Online learning websites

Online learning websites allows for independent learning. Open University is a prime example of people using the internet in order to further their education. In the future these online learning websites have the possibilities to be part of home schooling and a vital learning instrument.

Gets primary schools involved

Does this mean teachers are not needed?