I’ve always had thoughts of starting a blog or keeping a
focused journal and one day compiling it into something meaningful to other
people. I would disseminate it and
millions of people would instantly be awed by my genius insight into anything
and everything. However, generally I get
bored with my own writings within the first couple of weeks and give up my
project as a lost cause. Hopefully that
will not be the case in this class. I
don’t expect to awe you with my insights, but I do hope to have something
worthwhile to say for the entire six-week period of this class. So here goes:
Today I started off reading, Does the Internet Make You Dumber?
I have to say that my initial reaction was not favorable. I should mention that I grew up with the
internet. I only vaguely remember a time
when my household did not own an internet-connected computer, and I don’t like
to think that I may be dumber than previous generations simply because I grew
up playing on the internet. I certainly
understand some of the points the author makes, but I disagree with the final
conclusion. I would say that instead of
the internet and its distractions making us shallower, it has taught us to
filter out what is unimportant and how to focus on what we’re truly interested
in. The Cornell University class
example is interesting to me because I still believe that the half of the class
who performed better on the test (and weren’t on computers during the lecture)
only committed their knowledge to short-term memory. If they weren’t interested in really learning
the material, they would lose it just as quickly as those who were on
computers. The point to take away is
that if people WANT to learn “deep” meaningful material, they will, even with
the distractions of the internet.
After the first article, I moved on to Does the Internet Make You Smarter?
As expected, I agree more with the author of this article. I will say that I don’t believe that the internet
actually makes us smarter. It is simply
a tool and as such can’t make us either smarter or dumber, but I do believe
that as a tool, it provides greater access than ever before to material that
could make us more informed and knowledgeable.
I particularly like the point the author made when speaking of the
printing press. Not all books are
high-minded literature. We have to learn
to sort out what is quality and what is not, but if anything, frequent use of
the internet makes us more adept at sorting that out.
Ultimately the internet provides a platform for unknown authors,
artists, musicians, filmmakers to disseminate their works and get people
thinking. It is up to the rest of us to
decide how to make use of that.
Specifically from the article, “Literate societies become
literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to
read. Now it's our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of
digital tools.” Just as with the
printing press, the advent of the internet resulted in a major cultural
shift. It is up to us and the forerunners
of the next generations to figure out how to filter out what could make us
shallow and focus on how to put this new tool to good use.
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