Psychology of the Internet

Nowadays the world is unimaginable without the Internet. We use it every day and almost everywhere. The online environment can influence the way we behave, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. People from around the world are acting and interacting in many new, unusual and occasionaly alarming ways on the Internet. So I would like to review how the internet influences our behavior and thinking psychologically.

To begin with, in the virtual world individuals often craft identities that are different in reality. They represent themselves they always wanted to be. Individuals feel relaxed and free when they are communicating on the Internet. They can tell the lies freely and others won‘t see any blush on the liar‘s cheeks. As a result, others may not understand that they are reading total lies because they read just words in a screen and they can‘t see the reality. Needless to say, cyber identity-creation can become an addiction. People can forget their activity in real life over time. Therefore they lose the ability of communication, sharng ideas, expressing feelings with real people face to face.

In addition to this, internet makes people dependent. It is a really big problem especially among children. Playing computer games, chatting and others useless activities are very attractive to young people so they spend a long time by the computer‘s screen. As a result, they don‘t go outside, don‘t socalize with contemporaries and then it is harder for them to adapt with others. So ineraction is very important when children are growing and developing.

Futhermore, children learn a lot of new things by watching. Albert Bandura called it obsevational learning. So it is really harmful for children to surf  the net because there are tons of negative videos and pictures such as violent and pornoghraphy. And this information is easily available even for children. So they can learn, for egzample aggression, from videos.

All in all, it is the fact that online environment can influence our behavior. In my opinion, although internet is making a really a huge benefit for human it affects people's behavior negatively because they interact with real people not as much as they used to do in their real life.