Some people may find this hard to believe, but not everyone is on, or has access to the internet. There are actually folks out there who are clueless about the goings on, on the world wide web (www). Makes the rest of us wonder just how they survive.
For those who do not partake of the on-line status, let me try and explain, in simple words, what the rest of the world is doing. First, the internet is something you find on a computer, or nowadays, a cell phone. When someone taps into the internet, they are able to find information on any subject the human mind can fathom. Kind of like the biggest library in the whole world.
To narrow the search for information, people use a search engine. No, this is not like the engine in a car, it's more like the index in a book. For instance, if one wants to make apple pie, they would look for the dessert section of the cookbook instead of flipping through the pages until they found apple pie. By that time, they would be out of the mood to make one.
The top dog of search engines is called Google. Google was created by a couple of guys while they were in college, back in the late 90's. The following is what Google can do: if one were to type "apple pie recipe" into the Google search engine and press the enter key, within a blink of an eye, 0.68 seconds to be exact, nearly 6 million apple pie recipes are in front of the searcher. Google also has maps that can give directions to everywhere in this country, and beyond. If one puts their address into a Google search, it will not only show how to get there, but what the property looks like. Ever seen one of those Google cars riding around? They are used to make and update the maps. Google is not just huge, it's mahonkin' big.
Today, if a person does not want to go shopping, they can get on-line, type in Amazon and have more items to choose from than thought imaginable. Amazon started out selling books, but now, if a person gets tired from reading six million apple pie recipes, they can order an apple pie on Amazon and have it delivered right to their door. Amazon even has a gadget that sits in a person's house and if someone doesn't want to get off the couch to reach their phone, to look up some information, they can just ask out loud and the gadget will answer them in a nice human like voice.
Moving right along with my internet tutorial, there are things on-line called social media sites. These are places where people gather together to show what they had for breakfast, lunch and dinner, where they are eating above stated meals and post things they would never say out loud. The behemoth of the social media sites is Facebook. Their goal is to make sure everyone on the planet has internet, although their last attempt to put up a satellite did not go too well, but that is another story. Facebook has an age limit for its parishioners, of 18, but no one pays any attention to that and then is mad because someone else's kid posted something nasty about their own.
These things are just the basics of driving along the information highway and I hope it was clear enough to understand because this is what happens when we "surf" the net (aka get on the www.):
A person gets on Google and looks for an apple pie recipe. The next time they are on Facebook, an apple pie recipe will show up in the advertising section along the side of the page and also an ad from Amazon, for the pre-made pie............... to the people behind these big name internet ideas, it's all about marketing and money....or is it? When I first figured this out, it was a little disconcerting, it was as if I had been followed or spied upon.
What if there is more to it than that? Who else is privy to the information gathered via the internet? I listened to a man who tries to educate people about how dangerous it is to put all the things a person does during the day on line for everyone to see. He said that the older generation listened and took note of these dangers. Sadly, the younger ones had the mindset of "the all seeing eye already knows where they are and what they are doing, what difference does it make?" I don't know how everyone feels about that, but to me, it is scary.
I will finish with a true story that was recently shared with me. A young woman was telling a co-worker that she thought she was being followed or bugged. She went on to say that every time she and her boyfriend would talk about things, those 'things' would show up on her Facebook page and Google searches. She had not looked these things up on-line, she had merely talked about them, out loud.
She has one of those gadgets in her home, the one that will answer any question when asked out loud. It listens all the time.
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