Updated November 9, 2023
Introduction
The disadvantages of the Internet are that it provides a perfect breeding ground for many illegal activities, puts wrong information with the wrong people, connect anti-socials easily for planning conspiracy, allow youngsters to access prohibited contents otherwise not possible in the physical world, addict the people with games/other unimportant activities that make them glue their seats and make them unproductive, hampers focus/concentration of white-collar workers and kills the memory power of the people by feeding them information easily thru search engines.
Evils of the internet directly or indirectly affect Business operations, inflict losses for the organization due to hacking of information assets, develop hatred groups against established institutions, make people lazy and non-innovative, and allow fake news and rumors in free circulation spoil tranquility and peace of mind of many.
Let us analyze in detail how the internet affects us generally.
Various Drawbacks of the Internet
Though the internet is the greatest invention of mankind with numerous benefits and has pervaded deeply into Government, Business, Education, Ecommerce, Banking, Space research, Entertainment, and News media, It brought its own evils and started affecting everybody. Here are the cases of how the internet affects various domains.
1. Online Education
- It offers nil or little face-to-face interaction between instructors and students and among students. It only provides space for monologue, not dialogue.
- The instructor cannot make an impact on the subject taught to the students like the personal classroom.
- Students don’t get peer pressure on observing the performance of fellow students as in the physical classroom.
- More efforts are required on the part of students to master a subject than in a physical class.
- It takes more effort for a student to develop relationships with fellow students and Instructors.
- A lot of self-motivation is required from the student side to attend the class and retain an interest in it.
- The value and accreditation of online degrees are lower than physical courses.
2. Internet Banking
- There is always a possibility of fraudsters hacking bank accounts and stealing money.
- Accountholders are deceived with spam E-mails and made for sharing account information, including passwords.
- People not familiar with internet operations need to seek help from agents for banking transactions and leak confidential information to agents.
- Some operations in internet banking of few banks are a bit complicated, and users have to struggle to complete the transaction in the absence of a clear demo or helpline.
- Due to inherent fear, people are suspicious of doing online transactions involving huge amounts.
- Completing a transaction is not correctly informed to the account holders due to incorrect operation of users or connection issues, increasing anxiety among the users.
3. Business
- Due to full digitalization, confidential data of the organization is at risk of being stolen by hackers.
- Business runs on IT and operations can be hampered by miscreants breaking the system inflicting huge loss to the organization.
- Organizations are at risk in the hands of cybercriminals who penetrate into the system using malicious software to steal data and extort money.
- White-collar Employees’ productivity will come down due to the extensive use of the internet for personal work and recreational purposes during office time.
- With the availability of the internet on the mobile phone, even the blue-collar Employee’s productive time is lost.
- Data theft by the internal staff is facilitated by the internet
- Hackers use Phishing attacks i.e., spurious mail looking exactly similar to official mail with a malicious link, and clicking on this link will plant a virus in the system and compromise the company’s data
4. Social Media
The Internet opened up a platform for the common man to share their personal contents with their friends, relatives, and like-minded people either on one to one basis or as a group. Many social media applications like WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Instagram, linked in, etc., came into being. Individuals started using these applications to chat, share, and remain in touch online forever.
Initially, everything was fine; People found it convenient and easy to remain connected with others, and they enjoyed the benefits of new technology. Without realizing the evil side of Social media, Business and other commercial sectors have started tapping the potential of the new media and its reach and began using it for business transactions and as adverting their products. But bad things followed good things, and the evils have started showing their ugly face, and the details are
- Photos and other personal contents landed in the hands of troublemakers. They illegally copy these contents and use them for wrong purposes and bring disrepute to the original owners.
- Sometimes the contents are manipulated using modern high technology tools, and the criminals threaten the original owners, blackmail them, and extort money.
- Contents are pirated by offenders and used it for their personal gain. Occurrences of Copyright violations are plenty in social media.
- Some miscreants spread hatred messages on Individuals, Groups, Organizations, Institutions, Religious groups to upset sentiments, cause damages, humiliate the image and brand of an individual or organization, inflict pain and satisfy their sadistic pleasures.
- Social media is not censored media and application owners like Facebook and Twitter cannot keep a tab on the bad content posted in the media, and they cannot police it.
- Character assassinations, spewing hatred reactions, death threats, and ranting are common in this media.
- This media encourages and gives a platform for people to post their kneejerk reaction without any decorum, respect, and regard for others and make the original owners of the message sleepless.
5. Personal
- People get addicted to the internet like Games, YouTube, WhatsApp and spend too much time sacrificing their focus on their work.
- Continuous engagement in the mobile and computer screen causes eyestrain and physical pains.
- Physical, social interaction is the enemy of the internet, and people get cocooned with mobile and laptop, and it causes depression in the people.
- Just as the calculator killed the arithmetic skills of people, the Internet curtails the thinking process as people tend to refer to Search engines in case of doubts rather than scratching their heads and get it from their memory.
- The Internet makes people lazy and curtails physical activities resulting in health issues.
Conclusion
Though the Internet has few disadvantages, as listed in this article, its advantages outweigh disadvantages, and one cannot live without it today. Internet is imbibed with our personal lives, Business operations, and functioning of many institutions. We need to change the way we work in the internet world and put in more governance and regulations to live and enjoy the benefits of the internet.
Recommended Articles
This is a guide to the Disadvantages of Internet. Here we discuss the few disadvantages as listed and their advantages outweigh the disadvantages, and one cannot live without them today. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –
