EDITOR’S CHOICE
The Crippling Effects of the Internet
Let’s face it, you’re probably very content with the modern day conveniences afforded to you these days; especially the internet.
Knowing that you have a vast amount of information at your fingertips, makes you feel confident and powerful. But is this reliance on the internet truly empowering, or is it crippling us in ways we never thought?
Teenagers today cringe at the thought of actually picking up a book to look up information. It used to be that you visited the library, perused encyclopedias, and checked out books to write a report. Now, teens are more likely to reference Wikipedia or search Google to find the information they need.
Statistics show that three out of four households with school-aged children regularly access the internet. Schools within the US house about a million computers, so resisting the digital impulse seems downright impossible.
Recent studies suggest that while teens can quickly access information via the internet, they may also be losing a very critical skill–being able to assess and evaluate information. Teens are not necessarily discerning about content found on the internet; rather,they accept information at face value with little concern for the site’s credibility.
A recent segment on NPR explored this issue. One expert Nicholas Carr said, “when we give in to the natural impulses to click and skim, rather than to read and think, the Internet may actually be doing us a disservice: It shortens our attention spans and even inhibits our ability to read longer books and articles.”
Taking this to consideration, then it might be possible that right now as you read this you may in fact just be skimming this article and not actually reading it throughly.
The internet isn’t making us stupid, it’s just changing the way we think. It makes it harder to read anything offline, as we just want to skim rather than read. This is even more evident in the way we communicate,
When it comes down to it we have to look at the whole enterprise of the internet. Carr says that “Google is very much the dominant player, and that it both governs and symbolizes the way information is structured. The way we gather information is by jumping around,” he says, “and that’s governed not only by Google but by the whole economic structure of the Internet.” In the article, he quotes one friend of his who told him: “I can’t read War and Peace anymore. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
This make me wonder what will become of libraries if people aren’t reading anymore? You can’t help but notice as you enter a library these days that more students are on computers than in the stacks reading books, which makes it hard to disagree with Carr. So if you’ve made it to the end of this article, what do you think?
Loading ...Miguel Padilla, Sylmar HS
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