Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Dumber?

After reading both articles, I can not really come to a conclusion. Both articles make a strong case and try to get you to agree with each. Long before the internet, research was a much longer process; one had to look up information in books and other physical sources. Now a days if you need to know something, just plug it into Google and you will have your answer in milliseconds. I personally believe that the internet is making us both smart and stupid at the same time.

For making us smarter, the internet is a powerful research tool, everyone researches information on the internet. If people need to know a simple fact they will use the internet to find the answer. The biggest issue I have with the internet is that, people will believe anything they see on the internet. If they see something on the net, it must be true. This is where I think that the internet is making us dumber. People are getting lazy when it comes to finding information, I think it has to do with the idea of time, they find their answer so quickly, but do not stop to think if the information is right or wrong.

I also believe that people take the net for granted, in other words they rely on it far too much. If the net stopped working for a week, people would not know what to do. Imagine if you did not have the internet for a week, what would you do?   

2 comments:

  1. Sharpe--McLovin'...

    The article that tries to argue that the internet makes us smarter is in fact a stupid article. It is entirely based on the author's opinion, and in other words, is stupid. That's what Maddox would say anyways.

    Try to keep up in our classes, you don't want to sink now.

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  2. I kind of think this whole argument is a waste of time. How can you argue that the internet, a tool, is making us smarter or dumber? That’s like saying a chainsaw is making us less fit because we don’t have to do the manual work of cutting down a tree. In the end, the tool holds no fault whatsoever. Rather, the person using the tool is responsible for how he or she uses it and the consequences of those actions. Students’ using the internet for research is a good thing, because that is what is happening in the real world. However, they must be mentored and taught how to use it correctly to achieve the maximum benefit it was designed for, while still consciously making wise decisions about the information they accrue.

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