Technology Recognizes No Boundary in Human Relations

Technology Influence on People's Interaction

Media and technology are reshaping the world around us. New technology that is continually being advanced has been changing people's interaction in interpersonal, small group communication, and one-to-many communication. Technology is enabling men and women to initiate, sustain, and end relationships in new ways. Although the computer may not be able to replace face-to-face interaction, the relationship that began in cyberspace may transfer into real space

According to Sherry Turkle, author of the Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of The Internet, when people are online they tend to express different aspects and different points of view in different settings. Online communications help them find ways of conceiving themselves not as a single and exclusive person, instead as possessing many aspects. In addition, as more and more people make their way online, they are discovering that the anonymity that characterized cyberspace enables those who do online communication to ignore race, gender, and appearance. Nowadays, online communication media such as: chat rooms, instant messages, and the internet enable people to engage in distance relations with family members and friends who live far away from them

The Birth of Internet Protocol (World Wide Web)

The vision for the Internet was initially spelled out by J.C.R. Licklider of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962. Licklider fulfilled his vision as the first head of the Defense Advanced Project Research Agency (DARPA) which funded APRANET. Subsequently, it was APRANET (Advanced Research and Project Network), a computer network that was using the TCP/IP to transmit messages between defense-related research labs. Licklider combined videotext (the delivery of textual information to consumers over telephone networks), hypertext, computer graphics, interactive CD-ROM, and multimedia (the systems that integrate text, audio, and video) in order to create the environment in which the World Wide Web was born.

The World Wide Web represents one of the most successful protocols used on the Internet. It was also the culmination of developments in computer graphics, hypertext, and consumer videotext services. As Tim Berners-Lee of the CERN laboratory in Switzerland observed that the researchers of World Wide Web were hampered by documents format, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was created in 1991 to solve the problems and the first primitive Web browser to display textual documents. That was the basis of World Wide Web

Internet Trends

The internet trends briefly include:

Faster Network : Broadband connections, capable of millions of bits per second are on their way to every home and cubicle. To keep up with all the MP3 and video files that broadband users download, the connections in the internet backbone are also being upgraded to fiber optic cables that carry billions of bits per second.

Wireless Access : A competing wireless technology called Wi-Fi offers wireless broadband access when you stay in one place. Nowadays, a growing number of colleges, airports, cafes, and home users are going Wi-Fi and information industry giants such as IBM, AT&T, and Intel are developing a nationwide Wi-Fi network. In addition, there is technology called Bluetooth for wireless connection across your Personal Computers or laptop.

Encryption : Digital encryption methods involve scrambling the digits in a message so that only the recipient can read them. Complex formulas called encryption algorithms are used. The algorithm plugs in a unique string of random numbers as the key into the formula to encode and decode the message. One of the implementations of this formula is on-line credit card transaction which is encrypted using a similar method called secure layer protocol. The credit card holders can tell when they are at a secure Website because the Address Window shows https ("s" for security) instead of http and a tiny padlock icon appears at the lower right of the card holders' browser frame.