After
reading an article about how because of the internet we are now lazy and spend
less time actually looking up information than we did I listened to a pod cast
that talked about how technology is just a tool that helps deliver information
to the masses. I feel that both of these articles hold good points but both lack
some things. In the first article Carr talks about how people don’t delve deep
enough in to the information and that they just skim the surface of the
articles looking for blurbs about information. Carr fells that technology is to
blame for this skimming problem. He feels that since all of this information is
so easy to access people only want what shows up to them first. Contrarily the
BBC pod cast talks about how it is technology which gives us the opportunity in
order to gather new information. Jardine
feels that since the beginning of time we have been using and fighting over the
ability to control the technology which allows people to access information.
The reason that people fight over information is because when people have
knowledge they become powerful. One example of this is when Jardine talks about
how the great library at the castle of Heidelberg was destroyed and the contents
were taken to the Vatican. She talked about how technology has also been used
to make information more accessible. First it was the invention of a cataloged library
and then it was the invention of the internet which helped to get this massive
amount of information to the masses. Jardine also feels that since the advent
of the internet scholarly documents are much safer than they ever were before because
you don’t have to worry about the hard paper copies being damaged. After reading and listening to both I agree
more with the pod cast of Jardine. I fell that technology should be used as a
tool in order for the masses to have the ability to and to access the
information that is needed for their studies. Carr does though have a valid
point by saying that since there is an abundance of information skimming does
happen. So I have an alternate solution
in order to remedy the problem of information skimming while still advocating
the internet as a way to access information. People need to be taught the
proper way to use the internet both for pleasure when skimming is okay and for scholarly
research where you need to delve deeper in to the information than people usually
do. By doing this you still can use the huge abundance of information that is
on the internet, but you will be able to get more out of it.
Bibliography
Carr,
Nicholas. "Is Google Making us Stupid?." Atlantic. July 2008:
56-69. Print
I like the solution to your problem about people skimming too much, and still advocating the internet. I agree that people need to take more time than just skimming through articles or scholarly journals. I can understand that if pressed for time, this might seem like the best solution, but how much are we, as the readers, really getting out of an article if we just read a summary or skim? Although your solution is a good one, I think it would be harder to figure out how to send this message to students. Because we are told so many things about how to look past the first page during a Google search, and yet most of us don't. So it would be interesting to see how you would go about teaching this solution to others. For me, I am not exactly sure how I would go about spreading that message, but I know that it would have to be effective.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading this because of the historical context. It is interesting to see how gaining knowledge through information, and the storing of that information has been happening for a very long time. It is very odd for us to hear that a library was burned down, and the information lost, because we can store our information so easily in today's day and age. Knowledge really is power, and the fight for that power is still going on.
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