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Where the hell would you get your shareware if there was no internet?
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Can you honestly say that email is not a fantastic improvement over printing your letter out, sticking it in an envelope (which must also be printed with the address or else you must address it by hand), looking for the damn stamps, going out to buy more stamps because you’re out, applying the stamp, applying the 1¢ extra stamp because the Post Office just changed the cost of a first-class letter, marching to the mailbox and inserting the letter, and then waiting for days for the mail to get there and a return letter (possibly) making its way back?
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Napster. For all those no-longer-in-print music recordings you really want to have a copy of.
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Your own web site. Your opinions for all the world to read. Or your service available at a reasonable cost for all the world to hire.
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Instant messaging. Or IRC for the Philistines. Live conversation that you have a copy of when you’re done. So much nicer than telephone.
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Online banking. See everything I said about email, then add the convenience of having the check amount immediately deducted from your own balance and sent to the creditor on the bank’s own check. Never another bounced check. Recurrent payments that just happen and you don’t have to think about it. And no fee, even in an era of ATM fees.
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Tech support. If you are going to care for and maintain a computer, you’ll occasionally want advice and help, even the geekiest of us do. The SDMB, in fact, has become my first resort in seeking tech support–I get answers sooner than someone seeking phone support (they’ll still be on hold listening to bad muzak) and the answers I get are better answers. And it’s free.
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Telnet. OK, maybe you DON’T need to run the SAS statistical program on the University mainframe to look for patterns in your data. But if you did, believe me, it is much nicer to telnet in and run it from home than to catch the crosstown bus and walk across campus and stand in line for an available terminal.
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FTP. The internet is a network, that’s all it is, and yet what a hell of an impressive network. I have storage space on servers I can access anywhere in the world (give or take a couple of jungles and deserts). No more “damn, I need those files and I left them in the Cincinnati office”. Just open them remotely from Tucson.
It removes the stranglehold the networks had on the news and information distribution.
Now, any old Joe with a computer can report the news. We are still flitering out the garbage from the new gems(Y2K), but there are emerging voices and sources that would have been filtered out who now have a voice.
The reason these voices might have previously filtered out could have been as innocent as the fact there was not a big enough audience to sustain their presence on the networks. But now, if there are a couple of hundred thousand people who will read your articles, now matter where they are in the world, you can publish your own work.
The internet is like a super application of the first amendment.
Got some time?
Part of what I do is technological research. I’ve done this for a long time, years before the Web existed. Before then, I had to keep back issues of every journal or magazine or white paper that I ever thought I might want to review again in my life. (Then there was getting those white papers…) Got any notion of the amount of storage space that requires? I literally had an entire room set aside for periodicals. It’s also not easily searchable. Say that I know that I need specs for a particular computer. I would have to physically page through the magazines until I found it (and hope I’d started with the right stack) or I could do a quick search on specifications NEAR ComputerName and come up with something.
Document transfer. I do a lot of work online. Before email became an acceptable method of delivery I spent a fortune on FedEx. Still do it for some things, but I email many more documents than I send hard copies. Email is much faster, just as reliable, and not affected by weather.
Collaboration. Many of the people I work and share data with are not in the same building, town, state or sometimes country as me. While there is still no substitute for face time, email and the Web anlow us to share a lot of information ahead of time so we can do the real work on person.
I travel frequently. If I’m going to a large city, then I could watch the Weather Channel and wait around until a brief conditions report comes on, but if I’m going somewhere small or not in the US this information is hard to come by. Alternatively, I could log onto one of the free weather sites, type the name of the city I’m visiting, and find a weather report so I know whether to pack rainboots or a bikini. I can also use the 'Net to easily get maps of the area (although, to be honest, I always double-check directions. I’ve been bitten by trusting online maps to too fine a degree of detail.) For general use, those maps are handy. I don’t keep city maps for every city in North America.
Online applications. Using the Internet and an application service provider, it is currently possible to work online from anywhere as though you were in your office. Not the same thing as a dial-up connection for many reasons, not least of which is that dial-up connections incur long-distance charges.
Newspapers. I could subscribe to a bunch of newspapers and get drowned in paper, or I could subscribe to the couple I want to carry around and get online subscriptions (or free access, for some papers) to newspapers that I want to browse or search.
Someone already mentioned tech support. Remember getting fax-back tech support? Remember dialing up to the BBS to find drivers? Remember not having email access to tech support people, so you had to have problems on someone else’s schedule instead of describing the problem when you had it and sending it off?
Man, if you really can’t see any viable use for the Internet beyond ads and porn then I suggest that you’re either not using it very well or it’s so integral a part of your life you don’t even notice it.
I suppose that it can be a place where a person can use the word “inveigh” without fear of ridicule or misunderstanding is an intangible benefit. 
Everyone so far (except for Mekhazzio) has been focusing on the consumer benfits, which are nice, and very convenient. But the business apps are incredible, too.
For example, dropzone wants to buy a CD. My website is in, I dunno, Brazil. He enters his customer information, and the CD he wants. Within a matter of seconds, I am able to check the supply at the warehouse for his CD, caluclate local tax for his purchase, bill his credit card, and make sure I order more of this CD from my purchaser. Potentially, I could route this CD’s status directly to the distributor, so that the truck that’s just about to roll out the door can throw an extra copy on. And dropzone can come back to my site to track his order, which I shipped via FedEx.
So my supply chain gets integrated with my ordering process which gets integrated with my shipper. That’s a pretty powerful tool for a merchant to have.
Necros reminded me that at work, the Internet is tremendously useful insofar as some of our customers have built vendor websites where we have greater or lesser access to their information. Accounts Receivable monitors order payment status; Marketing checks for accurate product information; Distribution checks schedules and gets routing guidelines. Aside from Office Depot charging us $5000 for a setup fee, it more than pays off.
TV and the Internet are different because of three major reasons. These reasons keep the Internet fresh, useful and alive, as opposed to the painful deadness of TV.
Nobody owns the Internet. It is nobody’s profit machine. Therefor the Internet CANNOT be channeled in any one way. Even if 95% of the Internet is advertisment laden foul stuff, that 5% that is good is just as accessable! There are built in safegaurds against Internet homogeny.
And the Internet is not a one-way media. People add to the Internet constantly. It never stagnates. Even ordianary people without a lot of money can add to it. Ulike TV, expression via the Internet is not a simple matter of who has cash. Thanks to the low costs, advertising may permeate but will never take over, like it did with TV.
Finally, and most importantly, almost everything you see on the 'Net is seen because you specifically wanted to see it. TV merely flashes images in front of your eyes. On the Internet, you have to actively search out those images. TV is passive, the Internet is active. Your brain keeps working and your eyes don’t glaze over. This is probably the most important distinction.
porn
Seriously, my business would be much different if not for the internet. I can have conversations with 5 people at the same time. I can talk on the phone, have email correspndnce with 2 people, and have an IM session going with 2 people, all within a 5 minute block Being in customer and technical support, that is a huge help in a small operation. We have offices in Australia and 4 in Europe and we can easily share documents and resources real time. I can’t imagine work without it.
i think we’re going to have to wait for the internet hype to die out b4 the true value of the internet can be determined. i was hardly interested in it until i decided to use it for intellectual wargame purposes. conventional thinking depends on allowing important information to disappear from sight. telling people about things that shows them they have been fed a distorted perspective of reality will have untold consequences for society. of course some people are going to play intellectual ostrich. i got some christians to stop going to a website since last july.
Dal Timgar
I think people are relying on this a bit too much. I work in customer service and when someone calls about their payments being late the 1st question we ask is, “Do you send your payment yourself, or do you use electronic banking?” and it is almost always electronic banking. There are bounced checks and they can take as long as 2 weeks to get to your creditor after you put in the request. It’s not all that reliable in my opinion. (insert angry snotty customers voice) But of course it is always "our fault, and we’re “holding their payments” because they use “electronic banking”.
Oterwise, I like the internet, but I think that it is a bit over-rated. I’m usually only on it at work, but I’m alrady bored w/ surfing the net. I spend most of my time online at the SDMB. I pretty much agree w/ everything else.
My goodness! The company I work for employs something like 17000 people. It also has a parent company and sister companies. There are offices spread all over the globe, let alone all over the country. And yet when any office anywhere develops something innovative, it becomes accessible to all. Central research departments can put spread their documents to all within seconds. Meetings of those from different offices can take place, with attendents demonstrating software without anybody leaving their desks. Processes can become fully automated so that staff no longer need to laboriously go about plugging sets of figures from a fax or letter into a spreadsheet.
How? The internet. The internet is one hell of an intellectual capital tool, of a kind that has never existed before and as a worker for this particular company I for one have no idea how we functioned before it existed. It must have been stone age. I’d estimate that we alone save millions of dollars per year. Seriously.
Of course they also lose some of my time to the SDMB…
pan
On the other hand, a major drawback of the internet is the proliferation of people who type “r”, “u”, “b4”, and “k001” instead of “are”, “you”, “before”, and “cool”.
As in “what r u doing?”
“going 2 werk”
“k00l what were u doing b4 that?”
“talkin 2 this really 31337 haxor”
I h8 that crap.
Ahem.
The Internet does not need to be justified. It is above your petty dicta, you foolish mortals.
All the above benefits plus:
Special benefits for third world users, including:
remote/poor people who could not so easily access info from libraries etc;
online translation services for those not fluent in a dominant language;
Special benefits for those in totalitarian regimes, including:
access to international news sources; wider range of opinions etc.
Even though the internet may only be available to a minority of the
people in such countries, news and info from the internet can then spread
by more traditional means such as word of mouth.
Hopefully this will (a) make it harder for tyrants to keep people in the dark
and feed them BS (b) reduce the lack of access to info caused by poverty
and isolation.
Reading through these posts, I was completely prepared to agree with Dropzone–“what’s the point”?
The massive investment, public and private, required to keep the net functioning so that (forgive me) slobs can go to stores, newstands, libraries, coffee bars, porn shops and auction houses without having to get up, get dressed and walk out of their damned house is inexcuseable.
However, providing a way for someone in China or Africa or the Middle East to stay on top of events and communicate is more than righteous. (If I missed a hot spot, forgive me. That’s not the point.)
Talk about the Law of Unintended Consequences.
TCP/IP (or its offspring) forever!
Inexcusable? When it saves businesses millions? They’re not just throwing money away here - e-business (in particular, as opposed to e-commerce) is an intellectual capital tool, the like of which couldn’t even have been dreamed of a few decades back.
What gives you the great insight to declare it inexcusable? I can only assume that you’ve been through all the company accounts, weighed up the use of capital together with its risk-reward profile and carefully calculated that a better IRR could have been achieved with a different use of funds.
Or possibly you’re just regurgitating something you heard on TV.
pan
Why? As the great dal_timgar mentioned in the free will debate not too long ago, “I am a lazy typist.”
Does it impede your understanding? Do you also hate the photograph developers who spell their names “fotomart” or some such?
Donut?
Gas?
Fax?
Smoke instead of cigarette? Car instead of automobile? I don’t understand.
The massive investment, public and private, required to keep the telephone system functioning so that (forgive me) slobs can communicate with friends, neighbors, merchants, government agencies, and so on, without having to get up, get dressed, and walk out of their damned house is inexcusable.
“the great dal_timgar”
EXCUSE ME!
i usually just tell people i’m an a$$hole. ROFL!
Dal Timgar
Good point. All those other words and letters are superfluous. Thanks to you for freeing me from my prejudices! I hereby suggest the English Language be officially reduced to a totally voice-inflected one comprised solely of the word “dude” (or “d00d” at the speaker/author’s preference) and the “smiley”.
Dude? 
dude. 