My Internet
A response to Does the Internet Make You Smarter by Clay Shirky, Is Google Making Us Stupid by Nicholas Carr, and A Vision of Students Today created by Michael Wesch and 200 Kansas State University students:
As I read these articles, I had an unrelated YouTube video playing in the background and had to take several breaks. I did the same while writing this response. I feel that's relevant.
Every major advancement in information sharing has led first to the spread of base content before more high minded ideas make their way into the new medium. With the internet, this process has moved much more quickly than with the printing press, but along with more so-called “good” content comes a comparatively enormous amount of “bad” content. In his article Does the Internet Make You Smarter, Clay Shirky questions whether the stream of valuable information and projects is worth the ocean of lower quality media. He concludes that we cannot have one without the other and the high-quality media is valuable enough to justify the rest. I would tend to agree with his premise but for slightly different reasons. My experience with the internet has been primarily with low-quality content made by independent creators, many of whom are young or have little to no formal training. Because of my age, I cannot remember a time when information was largely institutionalized and only available from verified and credible sources. I do not see this wider-sourced, lower quality media as a necessary sacrifice but rather the heart of the internet’s innovation. The democratization of ideas and information is, in my opinion, as important as the wider availability of institutionalized knowledge.
Nicholas Carr discusses how the internet has changed how we think. He specifically sites how the constant flow of information and interruptions has destroyed our attention spans and our ability to deeply focus on any one thing. His anecdotes and those from his friends rang very true to me. I have always loved to read and used to tear through novels. However, in recent years as the internet became easier for me to access it has become rarer for me to finish a book that isn’t required reading. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that I haven’t finished as many physical books. I have replaced them with e-books as well as more digital-exclusive mediums, which have made reading much easier and my general media consumption has increased. Carr talks about the internet absorbing and diluting different mediums. While this does often happen, the internet can also enhance those same mediums and can create new ones, and it is through those transformed and created mediums that I have had some of my deepest contemplation. While I can understand Carr’s apprehension about the instantaneous world the internet is creating, the internet I experience seems to be aiming towards many diverse methods rather than the “one best method” that he fears.
