Comment and discuss how information technology is changing our traditional patterns of personal communication.
             "Connect your kitchen to a French cooking school... your family room to Mars... your teenager's bedroom to a rock concert. When you live in a connected home, exciting words, pictures, sounds and ideas can reach any room. With 3Com Home products, your whole family can connect to work, school, loved ones and the world – today" This excerpts is from the home page of 3Com, one of the leading manufacturers of data communication hardware such as modems. This quote gives us a very good idea on how much information technology has been grown in the past few years and the changes happened in our traditional pattern of personal communication.
             People use Internet communication for many purposes. I identify some of these major purposes with the broad categories of communication, interaction and information. These categories are not mutually exclusive: Someone can participate in Internet communication for a combination of communication, information, and interaction at the same time.
             Communication: People use the Internet for communication in a one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many setting. This communication can be used for scholarly activity and research or for personal and group communication and discussion. Examples: Electronic mail, Usenet, chat rooms, video conferencing etc.
             The most widely used tool on the Internet is electronic mail, or e-mail. E-mail is used to send written messages between individuals or groups of individuals, often geographically separated by large distances. E-mail messages are generally sent from and received by mail servers, computers that are dedicated to processing and directing e-mail. Once a server has received a message it directs it to the specific computer that the email is addressed to. To send email, the process is reversed. A very convenient and inexpensive way to transmit...