Tatsat Chronicle Magazine

Impact of the internet on Society

October 7, 2021

Despite the fact that the internet was created in 1969, it was not until the 1990s that it became widely accessible to the general public

As the electrical engine was the vector of technical progress in the Industrial Age, the Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age. This worldwide network of computer networks, which is mostly based on wireless communication platforms nowadays, allows ubiquitous multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time and space. The Internet is not a brand-new technology; its forerunner, the Arpanet, was launched in 1969. (Abbate 1999).

We must remember that technology is material culture in order to completely comprehend the influence of the Internet on society. It is created by a social process in a specific institutional setting, based on the ideas, beliefs, interests, and knowledge of its creators, both their early and succeeding producers. We must incorporate the technology’s users in this process, who appropriate and adapt the technology rather than adopting it, and by doing so, change and generate it in an ongoing cycle of technological creation and social usage.

So, in order to analyse the Internet’s societal relevance, we must first consider the Internet’s unique characteristics as a technology. Then we must position it in the perspective of the broader social structure’s evolution, as well as in connection to the culture that characterises this social structure. Indeed, we live in a new social structure known as the global network society, which is defined by the emergence of a new culture known as the autonomy culture.

Ours is a network society, or one built around personal and organisational networks that are powered by digital networks and communicated over the Internet. The network society is a global network society since networks are worldwide and have no limits. The relationship between the rising technical paradigm based on the digital revolution and some key sociocultural developments resulted in this historically distinct social structure. The direct relationship between the Internet and the emergence of social autonomy is becoming increasingly clear.