The 21st century
internet is having a major impact on our culture and the way we live our lives.
The internet has become one of our most powerful tools, and we must learn how
to harness its power for the greater good of humanity. We must now keep it out
of the hands of our government, and the corporations that would use it to take
our money, and control us. In the next few years could bring major change in
the way we use the internet. The web 2.0 will either develop into a media tool for mass population
mind control and advertisements, or it can be used by the people to speak out,
and fight back against the corrupt powers at hand through grassroots activism at
least while we still have a means of free expression on the internet. The
government is trying day and night to gain full control over this media tool
with acts such as PIPA and SOPA, and now is the time for us to fight back.
“What the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity
for concentration and contemplation. Whether im online or not, my mind now
expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly
moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I
zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.” Carr, 6)
The point Carr makes is one that I have
not stopped thinking about since I first read this. The analogy is perfect. I
too have similar feelings about how the internet and other modern technology
has changed the way I ingest information. While in grade school you are taught
how to read and write, and the way I was instructed made it possible for me to lose
myself in words. Each word written down
was to be analyzed and were individual pieces of a what made up a structured
sentence. The difference for me today is that I am used to looking for key
words. I will rarely come across an internet post and immediately start reading
from the very top to the bottom, without skimming or skipping ahead. The first
thing I would do is actually see how long the article is, and actually look for
key words that I may be searching for. Quite often the subjects, quotes, names,
or whatever I may be searching for will be conveniently highlighted for me, and
could even be a direct link to what I am really looking for.
“We seem to have arrived, as McLuhan said we would, at an
important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of
transition between two very different modes of thinking.”
It’s an exciting time to be alive
in the world! Things are rapidly changing around us, and new technology is developing
exponentially faster and faster. In a little more than a decade we have gone
from a world where cellular phones were just becoming available to a world
where nearly everyone of almost all ages carries a device capable of not only
making phone calls, but accessing the internet, and making media stream able to
you from almost anywhere on the planet. Technologies such as smart phones are
going to be a major part of the human race from now on. I don’t see a way of us
getting rid of them now. I predict that the smart phones will continue to develop
into stronger tools, and will become essential for everyone to own. They will
act like a second brain that does all of our thinking and remembering for us,
and those people who never buy into the technology will eventually be
completely left out of our society of smart phone addicts, who will be busy
uploading and downloading information at a constant rate. The youth of the
future will have no time for books, and no time for any old ways of thinking.
“People didn’t have to memorize everything anymore. They
could look it up.” (Carr, 177)
By making artificial memory we no
longer have to rely on our own memory. We can have a backup. We can have
multiple backups of information. The artificial memory can be easily accessed
and it is permanent. Unless we erase the information ourselves it can last
forever, which is not always possible for our human brains. To me there is
something that just doesn’t seem right about the way we are heading. Search
engines such as Google, are giving us abilities to access information that no
one else in human history has ever come close to. The greatest libraries in the
world all put together do not have as much information as the web 2.0, and the
time it would take to find a certain book, then read through that book, could
take hours, while it takes me less than 10 seconds to search literally anything
in the world on my iphone. This is a major change in human history, but most
people never even take that into consideration. To many it’s just another
advancement in technology that they must buy immediately, or they risk becoming
obsolete like the previous technology.
“In worrying that writing would enfeeble memory,
Socrateswas, as the Italian novelist says, expressing “an eternal fear: the
fear that a new technological achievement could abolish or destroy something
that we consider presious, fruitful, something that represents for us a value
in itself, and deeply spiritual one” (Carr, 178)
The technological race to have the best of the best
technology is an endless one. The technology we buy will be obsolete before we
even turn it on. With so much focus on new technologies we forget that we were
perfectly fine with the old technology, or an older way of doing something. Today
the fear of being out of date or obsolete outweighs the fear of destroying or
abolishing anything from the past. We are a culture of constant growth and
exploration, and constant improvement, whether we are actually improving
ourselves or not.
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