Impact of the Internet

Impact of the World Wide Web and its benefits to various human communities

Professionals

The WWW becomes an additional medium of information gathering for many people, one group of which are the professionals.

1. Easier to keep abreast of recent happenings around them

Specialists from various professions can obtain additional information pertaining to their field not found in books and other physical research materials from websites. As the Internet reaches everyone single one with Internet access and are IT-savvy, information on the latest discoveries and developments in their relevant fields can reach them as soon as they search for the keywords using search engines like Yahoo and Google.

Compared to physical materials like encyclopaedias which will be available only after a period of time due to the time-consuming writing and publication process, the Internet offers immediate responses to search enquiries as it is less time-consuming to upload the information to a website or an online news portal. This greatly helps the professionals to keep up to date with the latest news and developments in their relevant fields, thus allowing them to respond faster by carrying out necessary changes and improvements based on the information they have retrieved. Therefore, it aids in their continued employability.

Medical personnel like doctors are informed of new medical and medicinal discoveries through online journals and online news almost instantaneously when the discovery is verified reliable by relevant authorities and the news is released to the public. From there they can utilise the material in diagnosis of their patient’s ills or offer more in depth explanation to symptoms they have yet to justify.

This is also of vital importance to researchers as Research and Development (R&D) processes are much valued in Knowledge-based economies like Singapore. Product innovation and differentiation can only be possible with in depth investigations into the various processes, keeping in pace with current technology. With the benefit of receiving first-hand and up-to-date news on improvements in technology that is shared through the Internet, this can aid researchers in their experiments and research work thus speeding up their job. Ultimately, they are in a more advantageous position than in the past when new technologies invented are kept strictly private and the researchers have to delve into the research work solely by themselves.

2. Greater convenience and efficiency

As the WWW is a digital media, information desired could be extracted from the Internet with greater ease just by using search engines or credible websites as compared to physical resource materials which require a lot of time and effort from the professionals to search manually across the millions of books available for that tiny bit of information. This saves time and energy.

Also, the advancement