How Broadband Internet Can Improve Your Life

The global brain. The Human Races sixth sense. The breeding ground of creativity and innovation.

All of these words have been used to describe the internet, and deservedly so.

The internet has provided us with a means of communication and organization the likes of which we have never seen before. It was not created by any one person (not even Al Gore), but yet it will surely go down in history as a turning point in our civilization. A time when humanity evolved forward in creating something new. Something organic, spontaneous, and unique.

In the time since the internet's "creation", (although it is more accurate to call it an evolution), it has proved the age-old adage that the greatest things in life cannot be consciously conceived, that is, they cannot be planned. The billions of people working autonomously, but also synergisticly and synchronistically, have come together to make the internet what it is today.

7 billion different viewpoints. 7 billion different skill sets. 7 billion different things to offer the world. The internet has provided a funnel, or a lens in which we can magnify and organize this phenomenon into easily digestible pieces, such as websites, blogs, articles, social media, pictures, books, videos, and more.

There is so much information out there that even if you started today and worked your whole life trying to digest all of the information that is available on the internet you still wouldn't have even touched a fraction.

We've come a long way since the days of the original apple computers and windows operating systems. We've also come a long way since the days of the dial up connection and that obnoxious phone sound that just had to be played every time you tried to connect to the internet. Most kids will have no idea what I'm talking about, but us dinosaurs of the 90's are all too familiar with that sound.

30 second or more load times. Freezing windows. Dropped connections. Hit the monkey banner click adds...Oh the 90's.

I once visited two different institutions in the same week, both of them having computers with an internet connection.

One was my great uncles retirement home with a public computer room for residents. I stopped in to check out the computers and quickly found out they had 56/k speeds. It was a shocking jolt back to the past, the owners clearly not having caught up with the times. The speed of the internet connection made it barely possible to get to a web page, let alone download anything. "Using computers is hard enough for the elderly" I thought, "They shouldn't have to go through this."

The other place I visited was my sisters University. The University provided Broadband Internet, free to all of its students, at a T3 connection...I was blown away.

Not only did pages load instantaneously; like you were flipping channels on a television, but full-length movies and albums downloaded in mere minutes. Downloading 100 books on any subject would take you no longer than a trip to the bathroom. A colossal improvement compared to a few hundred years ago when one good book was a rare treasure.

The number of ways Broadband internet can improve your life is staggering. It is no longer a question of if you have the resources to become incredibly skilled, knowledgeable, or well read in a particular subject; but rather how focused you are on absorbing everything the wonderful world of the internet has to offer.

The internet is a treasure of our modern age, a 21st century library of Alexandria. Make sure you're getting the most out of it in every way possible.

Don't let this opportunity go to waste.