Netizen – A New Citizenship

Technology has transformed to the extent that the entire world has become a global village. This has given us an additional & a virtual citizenship and it is called ‘Netizen’. This term was coined by an internet theorist, Michael Frederick Hauben during the early 1990s. These citizens are not limited to any geographical boundaries. The entire world is their country and they set another ideal example of democracy set up by contributing towards their country’s development. These developments are in terms of creating quality content such as articles, web pages, blogs etc. Their vision is to benefit large quantum of people.

While reading till now, you must be thinking that every internet user is a netizen but there is a catch. Not all fall into this category and there are subsets within namely, inactive (who join but are on and off), spectators (who only read and watch online), joiners (who join social media), collectors (who do tagging for the easier retrieval of online information, critics and creators (who create or publish or both online).

From above mention categories, collectors; critics and creators will be considered as netizens. So next time, when you go online just think on your contribution till now and how you can make the internet a better and rich source of information. According to Livemint, out of 3.4 billion internet users, 450 million will be Indian users. So we should strive to be contributors to the internet instead of only internet consumers."