Internet - A Blessing or a Curse? :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

The Internet - A Blessing or a Curse?I saw something blow out of the water painted on the roof of a barn as I was driving through the heart of Yolo Countys farmland. It was an advertisement for the upcoming Dixon May Fair. What caught my management was the last line of copy, painted in thin red letters, down by the edge of the roof http//www.dixonmayfair.com. Its finally everywhere, I thought, as I continued down the deserted, dusty road. No place is safe. Not even the country. Over the last couple of years, those tiny, mysterious clusters of letters have snuck up on us, like a sneaky race of aliens preparing a world takeover. First they crawled from a reckoner and found their way onto the bottoms of billboards and magazine ads, cleverly hidden outside(a) from the casual glance, amidst the small print. Once you had to have sharp eyes to notice them. But the little things grew and multiplied and now you have to be blind to look out on them. Theyre on our books, our untr iedspapers, our cereal boxes, our CDs, our clothing, our dairy products, our garden supplies, and our movies. Its hard to go anywhere or do anything without bumping into our new friends http and www. But do they drive in peace? Or do they have something else up their cyber-sleeves? Are they a blessing or a curse? For anyone with a strong computer phobia, like my father, or even with a mild techno-aversion, like the one Ive inherited from him, its easy to read conspiracies and invasion plots into every new computer advancement. Its also easy to feel that were caught in a dangerous tug-of-war, and that the machines are winning. My father, Vernon, is the head of the chemistry department at westbound Virginia State College, and he refuses to use computers any more than the bare minimum his job requires. While the rest of his department (and the rest of the world) fire off warm e-mail notes and memos to one another, he still writes with pencil and paper and licks just as many stamps and envelopes as he ever did. Except for the letters I send to my dad, most of my outgoing mail these days is electronic.