Blog Post #6

As a student in the digital age, I feel completely overwhelmed by technology. I never thought I’d see the day that the only school supply I need is a laptop. While having the world at the tip of your fingers seems like a great convenience, this virtual realm has many adverse effects as well.

As an incessantly curious person who loves to write, the internet is my savior. I cannot imagine having to thumb through a dictionary or thesaurus to find the exact definition or that perfect word, nor can I imagine having to write everything by hand. I am on a constant quest for knowledge, and the internet not only provides me with all the knowledge I could need, but gives me most of that information in various formats, along with commentaries, summaries, etc. There are so many perspectives available to me, and that can be nothing but beneficial to the development of my own perspective. Beyond that, having that much information so readily available to me makes it unbelievably easier to find out exactly what I need to know.

However, having all these perspectives makes it hard to know what is true. I envy my parents and their ability to trust most of what they read. In a world where two-year-olds can access the internet, it’s entirely necessary to know where your information is coming from and why it’s there, like the article from Scientific America discussed. It’s all too easy to find one website that gives you that one fact you need to prove your argument, and to have your next link lead you to a list of reasons why that other website was BS, leaving you feeling as lost as Dorothy when she first got to Oz:

I also believe that it’s harder to keep a clear head and stay focused. With such a vast array of information available to you, it’s very easy to get caught up researching the wrong things, or to subconsciously let someone else’s interpretation of something become your own. When you read a book or essay or lab report, you get to make your own conclusions based on the information in front of you. When you read a blog post or see a YouTube video, your eyes get six comments deep before your brain can process what you just read or watched. While this can open our minds, being bombarded with this many opinions can seriously take away from your ability to think as an individual and come up with one on your own. I definitely think it’s important to teach kids at a young age how to research effectively, because it is so easy to get lost in that sea of endless information and not even realize how biased the information you’re encountering really is.

My last qualm with the digital age is that it makes me lazy. I once got a 100% on an essay on The Scarlet Letter, a novel which I read completely through SparkNotes. While the availability of summaries and analyses of symbols in this novel did allow for me to gain a very deep understanding of the text without even actually reading it, and led me to be able to skim it and find key quotes easily, it also prevented me from fully engaging with the text. It was like solving a Rubik’s Cube by moving all the stickers to the right places. Maybe I got the same end result, but it wasn’t nearly as satisfying or resonating. I find myself having to re-read my essay to remember all the grandiose ideas I pulled from these symbols, whereas I think I have my essay on The Great Gatsby, a book I read cover to cover, ingrained into my head.

To say the least, the internet is awesome. It is convenient, saves time, and allows me to interact with information in a much deeper way than was possible fifty years ago, as I’m connected to other people interacting with the same information. However, it also makes a lot of things less meaningful. I bet I would remember all those Friedrich Nietzsche quotes I used in my Macbeth research paper if I’d had to actually read some of his work and extract them myself, but they were instead already separated and annotated for my via the lovely world wide web, and you know what they say: easy come, easy go. I am not sure how I feel about technology yet, about it’s mindless ease, about the way it sums up our world and lives in a few short phrases and moving images, about the way it’s attuning my brain to flick across a page looking for key words rather than absorbing every sentence, something that I love to do as an English major, but definitely have trouble accomplishing. I do know that it is a wonderful tool to help mitigate my curiosity, that is until I see the next headline that piques it again. I know that it allows me to know a ridiculous amount of information about people I may never meet, something that might give me a false sense of knowledge and be detrimental to my understanding of that person, but that might also make us all a little closer. I also know that the pressure of having the whole world in my hand, and knowing that the whole world has me too, can be far too much for me to handle sometimes, and during those times I need to disconnect myself and go outside. Sometimes, I even bring a book.