Internet and its phenomenon

With the expansion of Internet, people have been introduced to new ways of communication. The new possibilities quickly gained a lot of fans, as they were easier, cheaper, faster and had practically unlimited range. All of this resulted in leaving behind the obsolete hand written letters, and electronic mail and Internet communicators started to become more and more popular. There was only one problem with this type of communication, it was hard for the writer to show his emotions, as the receiver didn’t see his face nor couldn’t hear the tone of his voice. That need was the catalyst for inventing smiley’s – a way to show emotions in a written text.

To be honest, emoticons where known way before the introduction of Internet. The first signs of them being used, are dated at around 19^th century. Nevertheless the first person who proposed it in an email conversation was  Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The message in which he used a smiley face was sent on 19 September 1982. The content of the message was direct and it encouraged people to make a face like this -> : – ) every time they made a joke via e-mail. It also advised them to read it sideways. Later on the emoticons evolved and tons of new ones started to show up every day. At a later stage this became just ridiculous and people just started to invent pictures similar with for example animals, just because that was funny. It’s a little bit not what the idea of smiley’s was in the first place.

As now they are so popular, we don’t have to swivel our heads to see the face. Popular Internet communicators, have a script that recognizes emoticons in a text, and shows them as a graphic reflection. This makes the text look brighter and easier to read. There’s also this bad habit of overusing the smiley faces, that some people have. A conversation with them is really hard because they use more picture than actual text. Nevertheless, emoticons, if used in a proper way, are a very big simplification, to everyday Internet chats.

Internet is a fantastic place in which you can look for information, find an relaxing activity that will help you kill time, or just help you to better communicate with your friends. Unfortunately, the possibilities that it creates, can often be used in an illegal way. What’s amazing, is that not everyone who is breaking the law in the Internet, is even aware of it.

When the Internet was being created, back in late sixties, its main purpose was to send files and information between two or more computers, placed far from one another. This is called P2P(peer-to-peer), and it means that all the hosts are equal to each other. Later when the Internet evolved, special programs have been created to help average people, exchange data. The most popular protocol for files exchange nowadays is torrent. It’s used by hundreds of millions of people all across the world. Not many of them know, that the content they are exchanging is protected by copyrights, and cannot be shared globally. As a matter of fact, downloading a file you don’t own such as a movie or a song, is basically just stealing. It has a social concession, and isn’t treated the same as, for example stealing a wallet, but it’s the same thing. There’s no conscience-stricken, because people don’t feel that they are doing something bad to another person. And as everybody is doing it to save money, no one will really decry for it. The truth is, that somebody spend a lot of time on creating this content, and he has the right, to put a price on it, because it’s his way of making a living.

Of course one of the reasons of this phenomenon, are high CD, DVD and Blue-ray prices set by the distributors. In many countries with worse economical standards, people just can’t afford buying original records. However sad, this is not an excuse, as there have been many examples of people, who didn’t see a problem , until they‘ve created something on their own, and noticed how much money to they lose because of torrents and similar protocols.