of the Internet have on the fulfillment of the promise of the Internet?
2. What are the implications of the increasing efforts of government to regulate the use of the Internet for the future fulfillment of the promise of the Internet?
3. How will the so-called digital divide, should it continue to exist, affect social cohesion in the future?
A qualitative methodology based in phenomenology was followed in the investigation of the research questions. Data were collected from a sample of socially aware and technologically proficient university students through the conduct of focus group discussions. These data were synthesized and qualitatively assessed to develop answers to the three research questions investigated.
An important development in the evolution of information technology was the creation of the Internet. The Internet, however, is just the latest development in the long continuum of information technology development (Tarr, 2000).
The Internet has changed since it came into existence. It was conceived in the era of time-sharing, but has survived into the era of personal computers, client-server, peer-to-peer computing, and the network computer. It was designed before local area networks (LANs) existed, but has accommodated that new network technology, as well as the more recent ATM and frame-switched services. It was envisioned as supporting a range of functions from file sharing and remote login to resource sharing and collaboration, and has spawned electronic mail and the WWW (World Wide Web). One should not conclude that the Internet has finished changing. It is now changing to provide such new services as real time transport to more effectively support audio and video streams (Leiner, 2000).
Organizations and individuals who want to use the Internet and WWW must have a means of accessing the network. All computer operating systems available on a wide scale today support Internet access. The us...