I'm going to tell you the truth. I don't use a Blackberry or an iPhone. I use a pre-paid phone, and it feels strange when people whip out their phones to surf the Web and text several people at a time. It makes me feel like I should be doing it, but for me it's too costly to buy and keep up with the service fees.
Cost is a major problem not only for phones, but also for the Internet. Every time you surf certain websites and download from the Web, you must pay a premium price for a better service, like faster download speeds or access to certain intellectual materials, hence the word "freemium." Not only that, you have to download various applications on the smart phone to gain access to the Web. It makes me wish for the days when everything on the World Wide Web was free to explore.
People say using a smartphone is a life changer, and will never go back to using analog and out of date phones. This probably is the case because those who have an iPhone or Blackberry don't spend as much time on a desktop computer reading their e-mails or looking at their Facebook and Twitter posts. Everything is in the palm of your hand. It is no longer a major issue for companies to be able to allow the public to gain access to information. It is how they do it; to get the pictures, readings and all those nice pretty applications in your hand, readily accessible and not make you go to a desktop computer and search for it.
It's the corporate business model that is getting us. The Internet has been around for about 20 years and it is now an important part of life. We cannot function properly without getting online. Businesses know this and they are trying to exploit every penny of every minute we stay online. For example, the iPhone isn't a quality product just by itself. It wouldn't be worth it if you didn't have any applications on it. What makes it so nice is all the applications on it, which cost money to download, depending on the quality of the application. The Internet is now a source not only for communication, but also for investment and moneymaking.
Compete, a Web analytics company, found that only 10 websites accounted for 31 percent of U.S. page views in 2001, 40 percent in 2006 and about 75 percent in 2010. The many outlets of the Internet are becoming more centralized into bigger and more powerful networking companies like Google. We can never forget that it was Google that really revolutionized the search engine. Of course, this is obvious, as the word "Google" is now synonymous with the word "search."
The point is that in the near future, the Internet is just going to become another obsolete aspect of technology, much like what happened to television, with people having very limited control. Current aspects of the Internet will be replaced with a system of communication that is more mobile and reachable. It is an inevitable cycle of industrialization: innovation, propagation, adoption and control. We are currently in the control stage.
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