New Mediums of Knowledge

Over the course of history, humans have continued to find ways to improve their lives and create new mediums of distributing knowledge. We are experiencing one of those revolutions with the invention of the internet. Some think that it is altering our thoughts in a bad way because it is a new concept. The internet has encouraged people to skim over articles and get information quickly. In my eyes, the world is progressing not regressing.

Humans sometimes seem to fear change even when it is beneficial. In The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, he writes about a dialogue that Plato wrote called Phaedrus on pg. 56. When Plato was writing this, the art of writing was fairly new and people saw it as a bad thing. In the dialogue, the title character, Phaedrus, and Socrates are agreeing on the bad consequences of writing. They say it will make people forgetful because they can easily be reminded by what they wrote. Plato was wondering if writing was beneficial because it was different from the current medium of speech.  Like us, they wondered about the new medium, but reading and writing turned out to be necessary for everything.

The new medium, the internet, is experiencing the same criticism when it could change everything. I think there is nothing wrong with being able to access information quickly. What’s wrong with not being able to read an enormous book because it is filled with large amounts of trivial words? The internet is like “a skilled hunter” as it says on pg. 9. It is helping us to learn faster and it that is a good thing. Hopping from one site to another and learning more sounds better to me. Moreover, staying on one site for too long just to read the ands and buts does not help you gain more knowledge. The internet lets a person cut to the chase and things are improving. Soon they’ll be shooting information into our brain and people will complain that it is cheating. Meanwhile, life is still improving more and more. So do you think that the internet is just criticized because its effects are new to us? Do you also think it will improve us because of its efficiency or make us shallow because we skim over everything?