Saturday, September 26, 2009

Ariella Aghalarian

The articles “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and “The Internet Is No Substitute for the Dying Newspaper Industry” both have opposite views about how the internet, and technology in general, affects not only us, but the world around us today. The first article, about Google talks about how the internet has made it more difficult to, basically, live without the web, and the other article talks about how the internet has nothing to do with the decrease of newspaper use, for example.
One of the main points in “Is Google Making Us Stupid” is that the internet has taken away our ability to do the things we would do in ease during the pre-technology era such as: reading actual texts (books, etc.) and actually being able to find something without having to use a search engine. “It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.” I can’t even think of a time where, for example, I needed directions to some place and my first instinct was to ask for directions instead of going to MapQuest, and don’t we always check online first if we missed an episode of our favorite shows? I know I do. It’s become like the internet is our fist choice to find things because it’s faster and easier and, in my opinion, our generation is one that has become less patient than the ones before us and we want everything available to us- fast. It has, as mentioned, made it harder for us, as students, to focus when reading actual text (as I have even experienced while doing this homework) because the usual “internet text” is shorter and easier- we wouldn’t want that to change again. Often times, when doing work on the computer, which in recent years it is as if there is no other way to function, there a myriad of websites we are able to visit in the process that makes us lose track of what were doing and aids procrastination. Almost everything we do involves technology and even our learning has been affected. No more do we need to actually know our grammar rules and how to spell –spell check can do that for us. No more dictionaries- we have dictionary.com and know more books needed to find things because everything lives in Google. Now there’s no need to be smarter, the computer will be smart for us. I’ve noticed that I cannot go one day without having an internet- connected computer available because almost everything I am required to do – whether academically or socially, is involved with the computer. Quite frankly, I do feel much stupider because of the technology around us. My math skills are non-existent without a calculator, my essays would be full of grammatical errors if it weren’t for Google to tell me the rules and where do you think I turn to when I just want a summary of the reading because I’m too lazy to read the whole book? Google. I would be much smarter as the people that lived pre- technology were. “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence” because we don’t need to push ourselves to the extra step anymore- our intelligence is based (mostly) on how much we choose the old-fashioned methods versus the new.

In “The Internet Is No Substitute for the Dying Newspaper Industry” the author seems to try and emphasize that the blame of the decline in newspapers is not because of the internet but because of the people and our “loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print.” It seems to be blaming the decline more on our tendency to look on the news channel rather than on the newspaper. This, in my opinion is not true, because there are many people that use both sources to find out more information. The internet too. If it wasn’t for the bolded headlines on AOL for example, I would not even be what was going on in politics around me today. It may be true that “Those who rely on the Internet gravitate to sites that reinforce their beliefs” but if it wasn’t for the newspaper, many of the pe-interet era would not be able to access this information and even though we may gravitate to one side- at least we’re somewhat informed enough to do so. Neither the internet nor the newspaper could take the place of the other because we live in a time were there are many with different capabilities and one cannot be deprived. The internet is not destroying the newspaper- it is helping it. The same goes the other way around.

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