Now I’m not sure about you, but my first contact with the Internet was in my teens, around the same time that ecstasy hit the market. Two massive phenomena that changed the way people party and communicate. Now, I’m not advocating ecstasy, just pointing out how they both became popular around the same time, perhaps not for the same reasons. One major difference between them, despite their popularity, is that ecstasy is claimed to damage brain cells and the Internet is argued to increase brainpower. On the other hand, one thing they do have in common is that ecstasy is said to have broken the boundaries of communication – people are loved and accepted – communication or lack thereof, depending on your journey, changed… Internet it has changed the way we communicate today… surely that’s cool, right?

Not everyone would agree. British professor Nicholas Carr highlights what he believes to be a negative claim of the Internet by stating that Internet use reduces the deep thought that leads to true creativity. He also says that hyperlinking and overstimulation means that the brain must pay most of its attention to short-term decisions. The vast availability of information on the World Wide Web overwhelms the brain and damages long-term memory. This is because large amounts of stimuli generate a very large cognitive load that makes it difficult to remember something.

Steven Pinker, a psychologist, offers a counter-argument that the Internet gives people more control over what they do, and that inquiry and reasoning never came naturally to people, and claims that the Internet is actually making people more smart.

So where is the evidence?

UCLA psychiatry professor Gary Small studied brain activity in experienced versus casual web surfers. The resulting evidence suggests that the distinctive neural pathways of experienced Web users developed because of their use of the Web. Dr Small concluded: “The current explosion of digital technology is not only changing the way we live and communicate, it is also rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”

I guess time will tell how that will happen. One thing I will say is that it’s pretty shocking how quickly the internet can catch on. For example, while I was working in a preschool, I observed how an 18-month-old girl, in a diaper and with a pacifier in her mouth, still without acquiring the power of speech, was able to stand in front of a computer, turn it on. and then she agrees to a game that she liked to play. Her attention span exceeded her attention span for singing Humpty Dumpty; In short, she was engrossed and I might add that she was pretty good at the game. So what is this level of hand-eye-brain coordination doing to the brain synapses of a growing baby?

Again, I guess time will tell.

For now, one of the main advances of the Internet since it began to be used is its role as a social media tool.

Surely this should be fine too, right? The ability to access people from all over the world with the same interests can only make one’s life better, right? Well, not according to Evgeny Morozov, who claims that social media could be potentially harmful to people. He writes that they can destroy privacy, noting that “insurance companies have accessed their patients’ Facebook accounts to try to disprove that they have hard-to-verify health problems like depression; employers have scoured social networking sites to screen prospective employees; university authorities have searched the web for photos of their students drinking or smoking marijuana.” He also said that the Internet makes people more complacent and risk averse. He said that because of much of the ubiquity of modern technology — cameras, recorders, and so on — people may not want to act in unusual ways for fear of getting a bad reputation. People can see photos and videos of you on the Internet, and this may cause you to act differently.

Social networking sites are also creating an element of grassroots power over which vendors have more control than governments (unless you take another stance and see the government control vendors, that’s another story!), such as Facebook and Twitter helped people organize political revolutions in Egypt, where it helped certain classes of protesters organize protests, communicate grievances, and disseminate information.

So it’s no surprise that in some countries social networking sites are scrutinized and filtered, and in some cases banned. A few years ago Turkey banned YouTube because someone uploaded a video saying that Ataturk (the founder of the Republic of Turkey and embellished public figure) was gay. For a country that wanted to join the EU, this was perhaps not a good move.

One thing is for sure: the Internet has brought the world closer together and this indirectly leads to changes in the way people interact with each other and how business is done compared to the pre-Internet world. In fact, the Internet has opened up many business opportunities and at the same time has made business more challenging due to the effect of global competition.

With the explosion of the internet, social media marketing is now the future of marketing,

Social networking tools like blogs, Facebook and Twitter put them at the forefront. Geoff Livingston offers a dynamic definition of social media:

“Social media…is the democratization and socialization of information, as well as the tools to facilitate online conversations. In other words, it is the shift from one-way conversations to two-way conversations.”

Marketing has long been viewed as distributing information to your target audience, that form of marketing is dying fast. Livingston speaks of this by distinguishing “audiences” from “communities.” And it is actually quite a paradigm shift.

Marketers no longer have the option of treating people as audiences because people no longer have to sit down and listen. People have options.

The hard fact is that marketers no longer have the option of opting out of community dialogue. The dialogue is happening whether we like it or not. We can close our eyes hoping they will say good things about our products and company; or we can help shape the conversation through our participation and, in turn, be shaped ourselves.

So it’s time to get on the dance floor and be part of the generation that is changing communication, marketing, brain function and probably much more that is yet to be discovered…