INTRODUCTION

Microsoft Internet and Networking Dictionary describes the Internet as the worldwide collection
of networks and gateways that use the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)
suite of protocols to communicate with one another. TCP/IP is a standard format for transmitting
data from one computer to another. TCP deals with construction of data packets, and IP directs
them from one computer to another. At the heart of the Internet is a backbone of high-speed data
communication lines between major host computers, consisting of thousands of commercial,
government, educational, and other computer systems, that route data and messages. One or
more Internet connections can go off line without endangering the Internet as a whole or causing
communications on the Internet to stop, because no single computer or network controls it. The
Internet developed in the 1960s in the USA by growing out of the ARPAnet (a U.S. Defense
Department experimental network) as well as BITNET, Usenet etc. It quickly grew to include
military, federal, regional, university, business, and personal users. It is now the worlds largest
computer network, with over 300 million hosts connected by the year 2005, providing an
increasing range of services and enabling unprecedented numbers of people to be in touch with
each other through electronic mail (e-mail), discussion groups, and the provision of digital
pages on any topic.1 Many people confuse internet with World Wide Web (WWW). As stated
above the Internet was created in 1960s and World Wide Web was created in 1990 by Tim
Berners-Lee and represents the full collection of all the computers linked to the Internet, which
hold information of all kinds. This information includes menu choices and highlighted words
through which the user can access further information, either from the same computer or by
linking automatically to another computer anywhere in the world. Therefore, World Wide Web is
only one of several forms of communication that take place on the Internet. The Internet provides
a range of communicative options to its users. Internet services such as electronic mail,
discussion groups, blogs, social networks, Twitter, Skype etc, allow users to communicate to
other users all around the world. This ongoing revolution created a society and culture
called cyberspace, which exists in this networked computer environment. A
member of this society and culture is called netizen. The Internet is often called
the Net. Both the Internet and the Net are written in capital letters, because of the importance that
1Crystal (2006: 3)

is given to this new medium. The Internet is an ongoing revolution that has affected the lives of
all the people using this medium and certainly changed the way people communicate with each
other. As it will be seen later, the Internet has also changed the way people use language. The
focus of this diploma paper is the extent to which the Internet has changed the way people use
English language.