Youth: Internet, activities and problems

The evolution of the computer followed the path similar to that of the printed book but in 40 years rather than 600. Like the handmade book of the Middle Age before 1960 the computers were massive, expensive, available to only few. The microelectronic revolution brought about the personal computer.

Nowadays many young people have computers at home. A lot of them spend their time in the Internet to find new information or just for fun, to chat with people all around the world, to make new friends, to play computer games. Some see their hobby as computer programming. Students have an active learning tool that gives them ready access to large stores of knowledge in ways that are not possible with books. The youth have special lessons on Computer Science ay schools, colleges and universities to become computer-literate and to learn how to send e-mail messages to their relatives who live in other cities, practice foreign languages, read newspapers or complete different tests with the help of the Internet. Many young people think the Internet will have the important influence on our daily lives in a couple of years. People can express their opinion free and no government have power to stop them.

The Internet, a global computer network which embraces millions of users all over the world, began in the United States in 1969 as military experiment. It was designed to survive in a nuclear was. Information sent over the Internet takes the shortest path available from one computer to another. Because of this any two computers on the Internet will able to stay in touch with each other as long as there is a single route between them. This technology is called packet switching. Owing to this technology, if some computers on the network are knocked out (by nuclear explosion, for example), information will just route around them.

Most of the Internet host computers (more than 50%) are in the United States while the rest are located in more that 100 other countries. Although the number of host computers can be counted fairly accurately, nobody knows exactly how many people use the Internet. There are millions, and their number is growing by thousands each month worldwide.

Among the youth the most popular Internet service is e-mail. Most of youngsters, who have access to the Internet, use the network only for sending and receiving e-mail messages. However, other popular services are available on the Internet as well: reading USENET News, using the World Wide Web, Telnet.

In many developing countries the Internet may provide businessmen with a reliable alternative to the expensive and unreliable telecommunication system of these communities. Commercial users can communicate over the Internet with the rest of the world and can do it very cheaply. But saving money is only the first step. If youngsters see that they can make money from the Internet, commercial use of this network will drastically increase.

However, some problems remain. The most important is security. When you send an e-mail message to somebody, this message can travel through many different networks and computers. Because of this, it is possible to get into any of computers along the route, intercept and even change the data being sent over the Internet. Another problem is sometimes an isolation from the reality. The excessive passion for the Internet might lead some mentally unstable youngsters to breaking the real communication with living persons of the same age, reserve and even psychic disorders. However, such problems will take time to be resolved.