Demerits of Internet:

There are still a lot of people who see the Internet as a promoter of immorality with all the pornographic materials. Let us ask ourselves. Is that all that there is in the Internet? Once asked a student from a rural area in my class if they had Internet connection in their house.

The reply was his father would not allow due to the usual concern, you know what. Besides the demerit of X rated material there are problems of hacking, using email / chat to kidnap / cheat a person on the other side has also be seen.

Merits of Internet:

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The Internet offers various useful tools for communication, among which we might mention electronic mail, the World Wide Web, newsgroups, remote access, file transfer and text-based and voiced-based chat. The net has become the most important e-mail system in the world because it connects so many people worldwide, creating a productivity gain.

Organizations use it to facilitate communication between employees and offices, and to communicate with customers and suppliers. Friends and family use e- mail in replacement to snail mail, due to its speed and flexibility.

Usenet Newsgroups or Forums are worldwide discussion groups in which people share information and ideas on defined topics of different ranges. Telnet is yet another communication function of the Internet.

It allows someone to be on one computer system while doing work on another. Information retrieval is the second basic Internet function. Many use of the Internet to locate and download some of the free, quality computer software that has been made available by developers on computers all over the world.

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File transfer protocol (FTP) is used to access a remote computer and retrieve files from it. FTP is a quick and easy method if you know the remote computer site where the file is stored.

Once a file has been located, FTP makes transfer of the file to your own computer very easy. There are hosts of directories that have been made accessible for FTP to search for files and businesses can use them to locate files they require for their operations.

Like FTP, Gophers are another information retrieval tools that can be used to access files. A gopher is a computer client tool that enables the user to locate information stored on Internet gopher servers through a series of easy-to-use, hierarchical menus.

Most files and digital information that are accessible through FTP also are available through gophers. The Internet has thousands of gopher servers” sites throughout the world. What makes gopher sites easy to use is that each gopher site contains its own system of menus listing subject-matter topics, local files, and other relevant gopher sites.

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There are also educational resources on the Internet. They are in various forms such as journals and database on various aspects of knowledge. For example there are sites where one can access online journals, or learn English.

These sites are of tremendous help to those who are doing academic research. There are also special homepages on special topics or subjects of interest. At the moment, not many people use the Internet for this purpose. It is time we encourage our students to visit these educational sites, especially the English language ones and this will go a long way to improve their level of English.

Commerce on the Internet is already a reality. The communication facilities which are on offer have rapidly become integrated as core business tools. Thus most of the business functions are communicative in nature. The emphasis to date has been on use of the Internet for communications with customers and other companies operating on collaborative ventures.

However, an increasing number are concentrating on transactions between businesses and on-line sales. The Internet Mall companies offer everything from books to flowers to travel. Trading partners can directly communicate with each other without passing through middlemen and inefficient multilayered procedures.

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The Internet provides a public and universally available set of technologies for these purposes. Therefore, the Internet is rapidly becoming the technology of choice for electronic commerce because it offers businesses an even easier way to link with other businesses and individuals at a very low cost Handling transactions electronically can reduce transaction costs and delivery time for some goods, especially those that are purely digital (such as software, text Products, images, or videos Marketing Communication is another business function of the Internet.

As the term implies, marketing communication involves the use of communication media to market a product, goods and services. The nature of marketing communication at present is different from the mass communication paradigm of old. In the present era, marketing communication is more likely to involve expenditure on direct response marketing than involve the mass communication paradigm of old.

With the advent of the Internet, this traditional view of communication media has been altered. What we have now is the new many – to – many marketing communication model defining the web or Internet. This offers a radical departure from traditional marketing environments.

Concluding Remark:

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The Internet is thus a boon for the Indian society since every activity or function of the society is covered. However, as it is at the moment, there are lots of benefits for businesses. It is therefore time we educate our society, especially the youngsters what to do on the net instead of denying them the opportunity to use it for fear of ‘x’ rated materials.