Internet and Social Media

Your phone joins a network: the Wi-Fi at home, or a mobile company’s towers. That network joins bigger networks, and those join others, across Nepal and across the world. The internet is the global communication system made of all these networks joined together, thousands of separate networks forming one vast network of networks. It lets people exchange messages, talk live, share data and reach huge stores of information.

You pay a company to join you to the internet. A company like this is an internet service provider, or ISP: Nepal Telecom or Ncell for mobile data, or a fiber company for Wi-Fi at home. Nobody owns the whole internet. It works because every network follows the same rules for sending data, which you will meet in 5.3.

World Wide Web (WWW)

People often say “the internet” and “the web” as if they were one thing. They are not. The internet is the network; the web is one of the services that run on it, alongside email, video calls, online games and messaging apps.

The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply the web) is the huge collection of interlinked hypertext documents and multimedia (pictures, sound, video) that can be opened online. Hypertext is text with links (hyperlinks): words or pictures you tap to jump to another document, which may be on a computer on the other side of the world. People use web browsers to search, view and download what is on the web. It has become one of the most used services of the internet.

The web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva, Switzerland. CERN’s scientists came from many countries, used many kinds of computers, and kept losing track of each other’s documents. Berners-Lee proposed one system in which any document could link to any other. By the end of 1990 he had written the first web server, the first browser and the first web pages.

Components of the WWW. The web needs these parts working together:

Part	What it does
Web pages	documents written in HTML (Unit 4), with text, pictures and links; a set of pages kept together is a website
Hyperlinks	join pages to each other, which is what makes it a “web”
Web servers	computers that store websites and send a page to anyone who asks
Web browsers	programs that ask servers for pages and show them
URLs	the address of every page, so it can be found
HTTP / HTTPS	the rules (protocols) by which browsers and servers ask and answer

Web browser

A web browser is a program that finds, opens and displays documents from the web. You type an address or tap a link, the browser asks the server for the page, then interprets what comes back (the HTML, the CSS, the pictures) and draws the page on your screen. Popular browsers today include Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox.

The first web browser was written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 and called WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus). It could edit pages as well as read them, but it ran only on one rare kind of computer. The browser that made the web popular was Mosaic, made at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in the United States by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. Work on it began in late 1992 and it was released in 1993. Mosaic was easy to install, ran on ordinary computers, and showed pictures on the same page as the text instead of in a separate window. The web grew fast after it: from about 130 websites in June 1993 to over 20,000 two years later.

Search engine

There are billions of web pages, and nobody can know where they all are. A search engine is a service on the web that finds information for you from the words you give it, its keywords. You type words or a phrase, and it shows a list of pages related to what you are looking for, the best matches first. Google, Bing, Baidu and DuckDuckGo are well-known search engines. Most give not only pages but also images, videos, news, maps and shopping. There are also specialized search engines, such as ones made for children that hide pages unsuited to them.

A search engine is not a program on your phone: it runs on huge numbers of servers owned by the company, and you reach it through your browser. It doesn’t search the whole web while you wait. Long before you ask, it works in three steps:

1. Crawling. Programs called crawlers visit pages, follow every link to more pages, and bring copies back.
2. Indexing. The search engine builds an index, like the index at the back of a book: for every word, the pages it appears on.
3. Ranking. When you search, it looks up your words in the index and puts the matching pages in order using its algorithms: how well the words match the page, how many other good pages link to it, how recent it is, and much more.

That is why an answer comes back in well under a second: the hard work was done before you asked.

Searching like an expert

You can tell a search engine exactly what you want with search operators:

Operator	Example	What it does
AND (or just a space)	monsoon Nepal	pages with both words (Google does this anyway)
OR (in capitals)	momo OR dumpling	pages with either word: widens the search
NOT, written - in Google	python -snake	leaves out pages with that word
“quotes”	"search engine"	the exact phrase, words together in that order: narrows the search
* (wildcard) inside quotes	"the * of Nepal"	any word in that place: “the capital of Nepal”, “the rivers of Nepal”
site:	scholarship site:gov.np	only pages from websites whose address ends that way
filetype:	model questions filetype:pdf	only files of that type (pdf, docx, xlsx, pptx)

Write site: and filetype: with no space after the colon; they can go anywhere in the search, usually after the other words. Search engines already find other forms of a word by themselves (engine, engines), so a * at the end of a word is not needed in Google; its * stands for a whole missing word inside a phrase.

URL

Every page, picture and file on the web has its own address, so that a browser can ask for exactly that thing. This address is its URL, short for Uniform Resource Locator. It is what you type into a browser’s address bar, and what a link holds.

A URL has parts, and each part tells you something:

• a.Scheme (protocol): how the thing is fetched: http for web pages, https for secure web pages, ftp for files. It ends in ://.
• b.Domain name: the name of the server, such as www.example.com. Read it from the right. The last part is the top-level domain; the name just before it is the name its owner registered (example); anything to its left, such as www, is a subdomain the owner chose.
• c.Top-level domain (TLD): the last part of the domain, after the final dot. It says what kind of site it is, .com, .org, .edu, or which country: .np for Nepal. In Nepal most names have a category before .np: .com.np, .org.np, .edu.np, .gov.np. (In .com.np, the top-level domain is .np; .com is the second level.)
• d.Path: where the page or file is on that server, after the first single /, like /teaching-resources or /books/grade-9/science.pdf.

Some URLs have more after the path: a query after ? (what you searched for, ?q=momo) and a fragment after # (a place on the page).

Your aunt in Dhulikhel calls: her laptop shows an error, and she can’t follow your instructions on the phone. What if you could see her screen on your computer in Bhaktapur, and move her mouse yourself? That is remote login.

Remote login is a way for a user to log in to a computer somewhere else, the remote computer, over a network, and use it from their own, the local computer: run its programs, open its files, use its services. The keys you press and the mouse clicks you make travel to the remote computer; it does the work there, and a picture of its screen, the results of its processing, travels back to you. The remote computer may be in the next room or in another country.

Remote login is used:

• to help someone with a problem on their computer, without traveling;
• to work from home on an office computer and its files;
• to look after servers in a data center, which have no screen or keyboard of their own;
• for teaching: showing a student how to do something on their own computer.

Examples of remote login

• AnyDesk: a remote desktop program that lets you reach and control a computer or device from another place.
• TeamViewer: another program for reaching and controlling a computer remotely. As well as remote control, it offers online meetings, file sharing and more.

Computer professionals also use SSH (Secure Shell), which logs in to a remote computer to type commands, with everything scrambled on the way. Before SSH, Telnet did the same job, but sent everything, passwords included, as plain text, so it is no longer safe to use on the internet.

Web protocols

When two people talk on the phone, they follow rules without thinking: one says “Hello?”, the other answers, they take turns, and they say goodbye before hanging up. Computers made by different companies, running different programs, can talk only if they follow exactly the same rules.

A protocol is a set of rules that computers follow to communicate over a network: how the data is organized, in what order messages are sent, and what each message means, so that the data moves efficiently, safely and reliably. There are different protocols for different jobs: browsing the web, sending email, moving files, streaming video. Web protocols are those used for the web.

HTTP

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is the set of rules by which web browsers and web servers communicate. It works as request and response: the browser asks for something (“please send the page /notices”), and the server answers with it (“here it is”, or “404: there is no such page”). But HTTP sends everything as plain text. Anyone on the way, on the same Wi-Fi or at an ISP, can read what is sent, and could even change it.

HTTPS

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is HTTP with encryption: before anything is sent, the browser and the server agree on a secret key, and from then on everything between them is scrambled, so that nobody on the way can read it or change it without being found out. The server also shows a certificate, proof that it really is the website it claims to be. HTTPS is used to send web pages, form data, passwords and payments safely. Browsers show a padlock or a similar sign beside an HTTPS address, and warn you on a page that isn’t secure.

	HTTP	HTTPS
Full form	Hypertext Transfer Protocol	Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure
Data sent as	plain text, readable on the way	encrypted (scrambled)
Proves the site is who it claims	no	yes, with a certificate
Address begins	http://	https://
Browser shows	“Not secure”	a padlock or similar sign
Usual port	80	443
Fit for passwords and payments	no	yes

Other protocols you should know

Protocol	Full form	Its job
FTP	File Transfer Protocol	moving files to and from a server (for example, uploading a website’s files)
SMTP	Simple Mail Transfer Protocol	sending email from your app to your email server, and from server to server
POP3 / IMAP	Post Office Protocol 3 / Internet Message Access Protocol	reading email from your server: POP3 downloads it; IMAP keeps it on the server, in step on every device
DNS	Domain Name System	turning a name such as moecdc.gov.np into the server’s IP address
TCP/IP	Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol	the internet’s basic rules: cutting data into numbered packets, addressing them and delivering them

Virtual private network (VPN)

When you use the internet, your ISP can see which websites you connect to, and the websites can see your IP address, which shows roughly where you are. A virtual private network (VPN) changes both. A VPN app on your phone makes an encrypted tunnel to a VPN server somewhere else, and sends all your traffic through it. Your ISP sees only scrambled data going to the VPN server; the website sees the VPN server’s address, not yours.

The main purpose of a VPN is to connect securely over the internet and reach resources. It is used:

• by organizations, so that staff working from home or traveling can reach the office network and its files as if they were in the office (this is where VPNs began);
• on public Wi-Fi, so that others on the same network can’t watch your traffic;
• to reach services as if from another place.

Well-known VPN services include NordVPN, ExpressVPN and Proton VPN.

Email

Email, short for electronic mail, is a way to send digital messages over the internet, using computers, tablets and smartphones. An email has a sender, one or more recipients, a subject, a message body, and sometimes attachments: files sent with it.

Every email address has two parts joined by @ (“at”): username@domain. In sabina.limbu@ourschool.edu.np, the username is sabina.limbu and the domain, ourschool.edu.np, is the organization whose email server keeps her mailbox.

The fields of a new email:

• To: the main recipients, the people the email is for.
• Cc (carbon copy): others who should be informed but aren’t the main addressees. Everyone sees who was copied.
• Bcc (blind carbon copy): like Cc, but these recipients are hidden from everyone else. Use it to send one email to many people who don’t know each other, so that their addresses stay private.
• Subject: a few words saying what the email is about.
• Body: the message: a greeting, what you need to say, a closing and your name.

Email apps such as Gmail and Outlook offer the same actions:

• Reply: answer only the sender.
• Reply all: answer the sender and everyone in To and Cc.
• Forward: send the email, with its attachments, on to someone new.
• Attach (a paper clip): add files to an email.
• Report spam (Outlook calls it Report → Junk): mark an email as unwanted advertising or a scam; it moves to the Spam or Junk folder, and the filter learns from it. Phishing emails, which pretend to be from a bank or an office to steal your password, can be reported the same way.
• Archive and Delete: clear an email out of the inbox, keeping it or throwing it away.

How an email travels

Pressing Send doesn’t send the email straight to your friend’s phone. It goes through two email servers, using two protocols.

Uses of email

• a.Personal communication: sharing thoughts and news, congratulating, inviting and sending sympathy to friends and family.
• b.Education: asking teachers and mentors questions, sending homework, getting notices and results.
• c.Business: writing to suppliers, investors and customers, sending bills and receipts, and promoting a brand.
• d.Marketing: sending surveys, offers and newsletters to customers, to keep them satisfied and loyal.
• e.Entertainment: fans get news from their favorite artists, teams and clubs, and join fan club activities.

Email is also how most accounts are made: to sign up for almost any app you need an email address, and that address is how you get back in if you forget the password. Compared with a letter on paper, email is fast, almost free, carries files, and is kept and can be searched; compared with a chat message, it is better for anything formal, long, or that must be kept.

Social media

Before the internet, people far apart wrote letters on paper. A letter could take weeks, and sometimes it never arrived. With social apps, a message, a photo or a video reaches the other side of the world in one tap.

Social media are online platforms where people create, share and interact with content and communicate with each other, often in real time: a huge online community. We make friends, share pictures, videos and messages, follow what is happening with people we know, and follow topics we care about. Examples: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X (called Twitter until 2023), Snapchat, LinkedIn, and messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Viber and Messenger.

Pros of social media

• a.Global connectivity: instant communication with anyone, anywhere: a family in Bajura can talk every evening to a son working in Dubai.
• b.Information sharing: a powerful way to share information and news, and to raise support for social causes, such as blood donation or flood relief.
• c.Business opportunities: marketing and brand exposure to a vast audience; many small businesses in Nepal sell mostly through their pages.
• d.Diverse content: entertainment, education and news for every interest.
• e.Self-expression: a space to show talents and creativity: music, art, cooking, coding.
• f.Real-time updates: news of a road blocked by a landslide, or a change in an exam date, spreads in minutes.

Cons of social media

• a.Isolation and loneliness: for all the connections, hours of online contact can leave people feeling more alone than time with people face to face.
• b.Misinformation: fake news, rumors and edited pictures spread faster than corrections.
• c.Cyberbullying: a platform for bullying, harassment and invading people’s privacy.
• d.Mental health: heavy use is linked with anxiety, depression and poor sleep, especially in young people.
• e.Productivity loss: apps are designed to keep you scrolling, and time disappears.
• f.Body image: seeing only carefully chosen and edited photos of others can make people feel bad about how they look, and harm their self-esteem.

Using social media appropriately

• Follow the age rules. Most platforms say users must be at least 13 (box below). They are there because younger children are more easily harmed and tricked.
• Set your account to private, and accept requests only from people you know in real life.
• Think before you post: would you be happy for your family, your teacher or a future employer to see it? A post can be copied and shared forever, even after you delete it.
• Keep private things private: your phone number, home address, school and daily routine, your location as it happens, and photos of documents or tickets.
• Check before you share. Is the source real? Do other trusted sources say the same? A shocking post made to make you angry is often false.
• Be kind, and respect other people’s privacy: don’t post photos of others without asking.
• Report and block anyone who bullies, threatens or harasses, and tell an adult you trust. Keep screenshots as proof.
• Set limits on your screen time, and keep the phone out of the bedroom at night.

Safely accessing websites

Every day you open pages from links in messages, ads and search results. Before you tap, and before you type anything:

1. Read the domain from the right. The name before the ending is the owner: bankname.com.np is the bank; bankname.com.np.login-secure.com is someone else’s site (5.1).
2. Look for https and the padlock before typing a password or a card number, remembering that a fake site can have them too.
3. Type important addresses yourself (your bank, results, email) or use the official app, instead of tapping a link in a message.
4. Don’t download apps or files from unknown sites; get apps from the official store.
5. Be wary of pop-ups saying you won a prize, or that your phone has a virus.
6. Keep the browser and phone updated, so known holes are closed.

Concept of online video meeting

An online video meeting (a video conference) is a way of talking over the internet in which people see and hear each other at the same time. It is like meeting face to face, but each person is in front of a computer or phone screen, wherever they are: a class taught online, a job interview, an office meeting across Nepal, a family in Dang talking to a father in Qatar.

In an online meeting, good etiquette (manners), ethics and dress matter as much as in a room:

• Etiquette: join on time, with your real name showing; mute your microphone when you aren’t speaking, to cut background noise; use raise hand or the chat to ask; take an active part; look at the camera when you speak.
• Ethics: respect others’ opinions and turns; no rude or disruptive messages; a professional attitude; never record a meeting, or take screenshots of people, without permission.
• Dress: dress as you would for the same meeting in person (for a class, as for school); sit with the light in front of you and a plain or blurred background behind. This keeps the meeting positive and respectful.

Examples of online video meeting tools

• a.Zoom: a video conferencing platform for hosting and joining meetings, webinars and online collaboration. Meetings can be recorded and saved to watch or share later.
• b.Google Meet: Google’s video conferencing platform for virtual meetings, remote collaboration and online communication, opened in a browser or its app with a Google account.
• c.Microsoft Teams: Microsoft’s collaboration platform for communication and teamwork inside organizations: chat, meetings, shared files. Meetings can be recorded and saved to OneDrive or SharePoint.

Concept of blog

Many of us love to travel and capture special moments on a phone. Those photos and videos, with the story behind them, can become a blog, shared on a website and on social media. Some bloggers become well known, and some even earn money from their blogs.

A blog (short for weblog) is a website like an online journal or diary, where a person or a group shares thoughts, ideas, experiences or information on a topic, in entries that come one after another, the newest at the top. Blogs can be about anything: personal stories, hobbies, travel, food, technology, science, farming, study tips. Writing one is blogging, and the writer is a blogger. A blog made mainly of videos is a vlog (video blog).

Features of a blog

• a.Posts: a blog is made of separate entries called posts, each on one topic or idea, with its date.
• b.Authorship: each post is written by an author, usually the person who runs the blog, sharing their thoughts, experiences or knowledge.
• c.Comments: readers can leave comments under a post, which makes room for interaction and discussion.
• d.Categories: posts are grouped into categories by topic, so readers find posts on what interests them.
• e.Archives: older posts are kept in an archive, usually by month and year: a history of the blog.
• f.Tags: bloggers label posts with keywords, tags, so readers can find every post on a topic.
• g.Images and multimedia: posts can include pictures, videos and audio to explain and interest readers.
• h.Social sharing: buttons let readers share a post on social media, spreading it further.
• i.Subscribe: readers can subscribe to get new posts by email or in an app.

Advantages and disadvantages of blogging

Advantages	Disadvantages
improves writing and communication skills	takes regular time and effort to keep it going
lets you share knowledge and help others	few readers at first; it can be discouraging
builds a record of your work, useful for college and jobs	personal details can be exposed if you aren’t careful
connects you with people who share your interests	hurtful comments, and the need to moderate them
free to start, on free platforms	anyone can blog, so blogs can spread wrong information
can earn money through ads or sponsors, once popular	copying others’ text or photos breaks copyright

In education, a blog helps students write better (they write for real readers), lets a class learn together (comments and shared posts), keeps a portfolio of work, and lets teachers share notes and assignments.

1. Write the full forms of the following abbreviations

2. Choose the correct answer

3. Write short answers to these questions

4. Write long answers to these questions