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| In what way did the cables damaged during the Taiwan earthquake affect us?
The undersea cables that were damaged during the
Taiwan earthquake on
December 26 2006 caused much of Asia's internet and phone services to
break down. When those services were disrupted, many people in the
region could not contact others via the internet, and neither could
they do so by ringing them up. Thus, a temporary
communication barrier was created, and since many say that the internet
and telephones make the world a smaller place (easier to communicate
with those far away from self), the world probably seemed much bigger
than usual.
This situation affected Taiwan's neighbouring
countries, especially China, Hongkong, Japan and South Korea. I think
the businessmen and students in those countries may have found the
disrupted communication services most annoying, for they probably could
not have done research, sent/checked e-mails, or even chatted on the
phone or online, and I believe that those two groups of people use the
services the most in our everyday life!
For example, men or women, in the
business world especially, need to use the computer and make phone
calls everyday. The proof? At almost every work desk or cubicle, there
is a computer and a telephone, everywhere in the world!
Teenagers were also affected by this, because many teens play online games (MapleStory, Dota etc), chat (MSN, Skype), blog and even use the internet for entertainment purposes (Youtube, Radioblogclub etc). Also, they use their mobile phones a fair lot, to catch up with their friends, near or far.
So I think that maybe the people who are in charge of those cables
should actually come up with something to deal with this problem in the
future. They might want to try and build a wireless network, so that
wires would not be used and that could lower the possibility of the
services being disrupted!
Link: Article
 Lai Ling
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| Internet has been very important in human's life. It provides us with a lot of informations we need. It allows us to communicate easily with the person who is far apart. Previously, we needed to send letter and it took a long time for the letter to reach the person there. Nowadays,we only need to type the massage on the computer and send it via the internet. But, advantages always comes together with disadvantages.Today, people are too much dependant on the internet, they forget that internet is also something created by human beings and disruptions can occur at any time. One of the proofs is when an earthquake occured in Taiwan,there were a lot of problems in sending e-mails, making phone calls, sending internet data, etc. Most of the people will feel very inconvinient because without internet they can't do almost everything. There will be a lot of chaos caused. This shows how the world will be if the internet breaks down.The idea to make the infrastructure more robust is very good, so that next time, it won't be too much disruptions on the internet. Besides that, people also need to be aware that we can't depend on the internet too much. We must find solutions when the internet breaks down. Maybe, we can try to improve the mailing system to be faster and more effective or we can try to discover other things besides internet to improve communication. -yasmine- | | |
| In my opinion, the Internet is being overused. We use it for business, communication and even for entertainment due to its convenience and reasonable price. It has become indispensable in our daily life. As we are too dependent on the Internet, when the Internet breaks down, they will face great troubles. It is more important, besides strengthening the Net, to prepare for people to be ready to deal with the problems. I agree with Weiqin that other means of communication should be used more frequently. Several things have to be done to bring back to the way they used to work before the Net became popular. To encourage people to choose the alternative such as telephone or mail, the price must be adjusted to be more acceptable, compared to the price of the Internet. Service should also be improved, as, for example, you can send an email abroad for just one second while it takes a week to send a letter in a traditional way. Anyway, this cannot be done immediately; so meanwhile, I think people ought to be more aware of what problems they may encounter while transferring important information through the Net. The more cautious they are, the more they are protected. Hoa | | |
| Actions speak louder than words. It is all very simple to say that we are all going to just practise better communication and what-not. However, it is getting harder day by day because life is going on at a fast speed and there is less time to actually sit down, collect our thoughts and pen them down, therefore ruling out the possibility of writing letters. Actually this causes us to say plenty of things we do not even mean to say. So we can get this huge chunk of words from a close friend, but how many of those words do we actually say from the bottom of our hearts? To create more time for us to cram more knowledge into our already-full brains, we invented the internet so that everybody can share their information. Everything you need to know about anything is just a click away. Information does not require you to look through dusty volumes anymore. It has become so convenient we treat is as a basic neccessity in life. We have become so used to it that once the system is down, so does our daily schedule because the schedule of the day was probably saved on the computer from the beginning. Even for this english blog, we are posting online. It seems so much easier to type everything out and the discussion makes it easier for everybody to keep in touch because we do not need to allocate a specific date to meet and the information is available all the time. However if the internet were to shut down, we would lose everything that we had discussed about. There also would not be anything to refer to because there were no written records for reference! So the question remains, how do we form a backup plan? nik[ola] | | |
| I agree with Rachel. I think that we tend to depend too much on the Internet at times, unknowingly. We use it daily to communicate with our loved ones far away and as source of information. We never think about how our lifes will be without the Internet. When the Internet breaks down, it will cause many troubles for everyone and many of the businesses, especially banks, will suffer as most of them use the Internet to communicate and transfer important documents and data. Thus, to prevent this, we need to have back up plans. For example, we can have drills like what we do to be prepared for terrorist threats or attacks, fire and floods. Maybe, we should educate the people about what other ways we can communicate. Instead of using the Internet to communicate, we can use telephones to communicate or even mail a letter. I think we should practise other ways of communicating besides jus using the Internet all the time. Weiqin | | |
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