Teamreport Week 3

News from Germany

This week I focused on "Internet branches and services".From the Netscape homepage I went to the directory. Yahoo offers the possibility to move into World News and then shows links to different countries. Of course, I chose Germany. I was amazed as I found a link to "Der Spiegel", a very sophisticated monthly journal. I clicked on it and saw that the journal is available in German. Wow!!! Der Spiegel reports on politics, economics, entertainment..simply everything that my heart desires to know about my home country.

Back in Yahoo I clicked on Computer and Internet. Besides several other options I found Networking and Communications to be very interesting. This link led me to different journals, e.g. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. Furthermore, the menu included bookreports and articles on networking and communications.

The information I was able to gather appeared to be very sophisticated, since Der Spiegel, for example, represents a very high level of communication and is known to report very accurately on facts about world politics. The style of the search appeared to be easy because I felt that the topics/links listed were cleary defined. Moreover, the content of the information presented seemed to be very well researched from reliable sources.

This information highway presents wonderful opportunities for the world in respect to Social Psychology. People from different cultures are able to share and exchange ideas through a relatively cheap and easy accessible system. However, this network does present a danger of becoming addicted. The amount of information offered at an extremely wide range of topics can keep an individual hooked to the machine for hours. I have experienced myself that I always find something new to explore while I am working on the Net. It seems important to realize the danger of developing this addictive behavior.