Briefly describe the ways in which the emergence of the World Wide Web has affected access to information, either from a sociological or technical perspective. Identify and discuss one key issue in depth.

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Petros Lameras        Page                                           11/11/03

 Title of work: Briefly describe the ways in which the emergence of the World Wide Web has affected access to information, either from a sociological or technical perspective. Identify and discuss one key issue in depth.

Name: Petros Lameras

Module: Information Systems (MSc)

Date: Tuesday November 11th        

Tutor:    Dr. B. Eaglestone

Module Code: Test Essay

  1. Summary

This essay aims to explain in a brief way the ways that Internet has affected information. The decision to differentiate and choose quality information among thousands of resources. However Internet has a great amount of resources that contain an overflow of information and the decision of choosing the appropriate depends on the ability of the individual. Also this essay describes the availability of free information mostly free of charge, which is provided particularly by commercial and marketing companies. Furthermore this essay is being focused in some specific ways of selecting and interpreting quality information, such as credibility, accuracy, reasonableness and support. Concluding, Internet has made information easy to find, because it’s easier to access. For this reason there are some certain steps that the user has to follow in order information will be based on supportive evidence and truth that will endorse the statement that the Internet is an endless source of valuable information.

  1. Introduction

  1. The Creation of Internet

Internet was first created by people who had the need to exchange information for scientific and military matters. It was primarily used by scientists from various scientific fields like engineers, computer experts librarians and others whose need for communication and exchanging information was very essential.

        In the early stages, Internet was only permitted to education and government use. This happened because it was initially sponsored by the government therefore commercial uses were not allowed. These constraints have formulated Internet until the early 90’s. Then more commercial and public networks started to arise.

After a certain period of time, people became more familiarized with the Internet concept, and they started, use the global network for certain tasks according to their preferences. Either for information, education, communication or even purchasing goods. As microcomputers were becoming more powerful providing users a multimedia resource and as certain commands became known to the public, Internet became a necessity to people’s everyday activities. In addition Universities and libraries discovered efficient ways to transfer files with each other with the appearance of certain transfer protocols like FTP. (File Transfer Protocol)

        In the beginning, when Internet wasn’t so popular and it concerned a small amount of people mainly for business purposes, it was very simple to handle the available resources, and evaluate them accordingly. But as Internet was becoming more habituate by the public, it became extremely complex. Many companies and organizations were using the net to advertise and also many universities were using the net even more for variety of purposes. As a result, the information that internet had, was very difficult to locate.

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        Because information is something valuable, and at the right time can alter people’s life it is essential to define information and to identify what part of it can be really valuable.

“Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose. Converting data into information thus requires knowledge. And knowledge is by definition specialised.” Drucker (1990) p. 202 

“Anything that can be digitized, encoded as a stream of bits is information.”  Shapiro, Varian (1999) p.3                                          

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