Overall, the main advantage is that it helps to build for better communication and social life. .
Yet, on the other hand, there are the disadvantages and dangers involved. These include cyber-bullying, privacy issues, addiction, exposure to online predators, health issues, and less time for face-to-face conversations. Unfortunately, these disadvantages occur very often. For instance, very often social networks threaten information privacy. It has been known that personal information of individuals such as name, address, etc. that is submitted to Facebook, has been sold to organizations such as Zynga, an application provider for Facebook (Wall Street Journal 2010, p. Online). Moreover, Internet-users spend 22.7% of their time on social networks whilst there are 350 million people admit they are addicted to Facebook (AZ 2010, p. Online). These people are diagnosis as FAD (Facebook Addiction Disorder) and they occasionally suffer headaches, eye aches, and other symptoms. As can be seen, this type of Internet-based communication maybe beneficial to society. However, it is also dangerous to our privacy, safety, and health.
Another type of Internet-based communication is email. It is similar to snail mail; however, these types of mail are digital messages sent from person to person via the internet. In addition, communications are preceded in an asynchronous time frame, which is what makes email unique to other communication types. Current available email services include Gmail, Hotmail, and more. In total, this communication type is used by 1.9 billion users across the globe while having 294 billion emails sent daily (Radicati Group 2010, p. Online). Certainly, there are the good and the bad sides of using email. On one hand, email can benefit us because it's cheap, environmentally friendly, easy-to-organize and reference, fast and eases global communication. With the increased usage of email, paper consumption has been reduced dramatically and by far, has been one of the most effective actions that have helped the environment and the business industry.
