The Internet

Many electronic network systems were created in 1989 and have continued to grow since then. They now offer access to information and the means to communicate with other individuals, businesses, or countries all over the world. A tremendous amount of pertinent information is available on what is termed the Internet. In fact, you do not even have to leave your computer to obtain information from the world famous libraries.

The Internet is a global computer network. It is developing very rapidly. You can read many publications (newspapers, magazines, journals) through the Internet. E-mail is the most popular service. Agreat many of people, who have access to the Internet, use the network only for sending and receiving E-mail messages. In many countries the Internet provides businesspersons a reliable alternative to the more expensive and unreliable telecommunications systems. That is always cheaper, because you send E-mail messages, you only have to pay for phone calls to your local service providers, not for calls across your country or around the world. For these services you pay your service provider a monthly or an hourly fee. Part of this fee goes towards its costs to connect to a larger provider, another part received by the larger service provider goes to cover its costs of running a worldwide network of wires and wireless stations.

112

Internet services combine the use of audio, video, graphics, and text for procuring information. If the topic of your paper is NAFTA, and you have narrowed this down to an update on the North American Trade Agreement, it is possible to gather material through an Internet service. When you enter this term, you might find dozens of sources. Therefore, you must make choices to narrow down your topic as you work.

However, the Internet is considered unreliable source of information. It is very important as you use the Internet to keep in mind the thesis of your research. Because it is so easy to gather information and nothing guarantees its quality and accuracy, the writer must not become distracted and must be the final judge of the facts obtained. Another problem is its insecurity. When you send an E-mail message to someone, it travels through many different networks and computers. The information is constantly being directed towards its destination by special computers called routers. So it is possible to intervene into any of the computers along the route, read and even change the data being sent on the Internet. That is why you cannot send original contracts, letters of credit, invoices and other important documents through the Internet. However, these commercial and technical problems must be resolved in the nearest future.

Another popular Internet application is World-Wide Web. The number of Web-pages is hundreds of millions. There is a searching system to find the proper Web-page. Such a page contains a short description of a subject (program, institution, etc.) and the reference to other Web-documents.