Communication efficiency has been highly improved since internet was introduced to the public. The world is brought much closer than ever before. Among various internet communication media, email, forum, instant message, and VoIP are widely adopted nowadays.
Email messaging is the most popular internet communication method. Acting like traditional post offices, email systems maintain massive user mailboxes and deliver messages from one to another. Users can receive, read and respond to messages simply through desktop software or web browsers. A sender can send an email to its receiver anytime, anywhere. Within minutes, this email will be “dropped” into the receiver’s mailbox and ready to be picked up, even if the two persons are thousands of miles apart.
On the other hand, popularity and simplicity lead to the vulnerability of email communication. Since email addresses are publicly reachable, anyone can send email messages to anyone else if they have the correct addresses, which induces an intractable problem – spam or junk mail abuse. Even though spam-filters are utilized and anti-spam laws are implemented, the problem persists and spam continues to burden email systems.
Forums, which have a bulletin-board-like interface, are known as online discussion groups in the internet world. Users can start new topics or post responses to a particular topic in a forum. Forums are considered valuable business resources that establish customers-helping-customers communities. In addition, forums, which make collaboration much easier, are typically applied to long-distance education systems.
However, due to anonymous accessibility, forums can also suffer with spam abuse. Moreover, without moderation and supervision, forums can potentially develop unfriendly environment, which downgrades their reliability.
Unlike email messaging and forum discussion, real time conversation can be carried out by instant messaging. Users can send text messages to others online and receive instant replies. Eliminating long time delay happening in email messaging and forum discussion, instant messaging can speed up the rhythm of our interactions.
But this “instant” fashion brings parental anxiety when children make “friends” online. With insoluble obstacles for confirming personal identities and perpetually emerging security holes, instant messaging sometimes can become a hazard.
Via VoIP (which stands for “Voice over Internet Protocol”) service, people can also practice real time conversations. A VoIP user can make voice call to another VoIP user or any landline user in the world. Presently, VoIP service becomes a low cost alternative of traditional phone call service, especially when long-distance calls are demanded.
Nonetheless, VoIP qualities radically depend on internet bandwidth. Hence, VoIP services sometimes fail to provide clear calls due to poor network traffic conditions.
Although all of the methods above have their shortcomings, internet did bring us a revolution of communication. And we know this revolution is still ongoing. As more new technologies are introduced, cons of these innovations can be overcome and new inventions will appear successively. Thus, evaluating the many options and choosing what works best for us carefully and properly, we can enjoy leisure but productive conversations in our information expanding era.
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