Thursday, August 9, 2012
The Internet Today
After I read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr I came to a realization about the internet. Usually when I play some games at night my mother would always tell me to get off or I might get leukemia. I would ask her where she got this information from and she would tell me that she got it from the internet then the next few minutes I would see her in bed using her android phone playing Draw Something. It seems that everyone gets their information and entertainment from the internet today instead of books and outside activities. The question that I want to bring up is what if we never had the internet? Would we know less today or still know as much as we know today? Would we be smarter with the internet or without it? Would we be as entertained with or without it and would we still be able to catch up with our friends from years ago?
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I believe if we didnt have the internet we would know alot less, and it would take a lot longer to learn new information. We would have to get all our information from books certainly, and we would have to keep the books in good readable conditions in order to get the information from them. I think we would be just as smart without the internet and alot less lazy because someone, I forgot who, brought up the subject that the internet is making us lazy and I would have to agree with that because we have google for everything and when we have to look something up in a book we moan and groan. Yes, we would be alot less entertained, but im pretty confident that we would be able to find new ways to entertain ourselves. Catching up with our friends would be diffuclt, because we always use the internet for that... or the phonebook. Either way I think if we didnt have the internet we would have very limited communications but we wouldnt be as lazy as we are today.
ReplyDeleteCarr also addresses this topic in his book. He analyzes and compares the IQ and PSAT scores from before World War II to now. Had our scores gone up? In "On the Buoyancy of IQ Scores" he concludes that we have not gotten smarter since the introduction of the internet, but that we have higher scores in certain subjects and lower scores in certain subjects.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I believe that previous generations were smarter than we are. Sure, with the internet it is quicker and easier to access information on the internet, but we don't read in depth. We just skim and look for the information we want, then leave the page. If we were reading books, it would to take longer to access the information in the book, but we would be totally immersed in the book and would more likely read more of the book and gather more information about the subject. As for being entertained, I am not sure. If we did not have the internet, I am sure we would find other ways to entertain ourselves. As with catching up with friends, I am not sure. During Carr's afterword, he mentions a book, "Alone Together," by Sherry Turkle, a deeply researched examination of how the communication technologies intended to bring us together may be pushing us apart. That would definitely be a very good read to determine if the internet allows us to catch up and converse with old friends.
I believe if the internet was never invented we would still know as much as we know now. We would have never been introduced to finding information with the click of a button, but we would be accustomed to taking time out to read books or encyclopedias to find answers and knowledge. Laziness would have never become a factor in our daily lives. No access to the internet would not make us any less or smarter than what we are now. We would be just as much entertained as we are with internet as well. We would entertain ourselves by playing sports, watching live sports, going to a play, or even just by sitting at home playing board games with family and friends. However, it would be much more difficult to catch up with old friends who you've lost contact with. There would be no Facebook engine to find old friends, but, on the other hand, there would always be a phonebook. A life without the internet wouldn't be as hard or boring as most of our generation would make it seem.
ReplyDeleteI think that if we did not have the internet we would get along just fine. We would figure out the information we needed one way or another. I do not think that we would be less smart, we would become better at investigating and looking to find answers. Maybe we would have become so good at doing things ourselves that we would have answered some questions we have today. Of course we would lack the easy information like Kim Kardashian getting bangs and some more important topics but either way I think we would have found some other way to get around.
ReplyDeleteIt depends on your definition of smart. I do not really know for sure whether we have become less intelligent, but I do know that we have become lazier. The computer has babysat our brains. We no longer have to retain information and rely on the internet. Centuries ago, scholars had to memorize entire novels, books, or stories. This memorization doesn't necessarily make them smarter, but it does prove that our generation is filled with a bunch of slackers. I believe that we could survive without the internet entertainment-wise, but we could not survive information-wise. This is because we would still have access to video games and the television.
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