Yes the same clichéd subject. Who hasn’t heard of this debate? Is the plethora of information we are exposed to via the medium of the internet making us smarter, or dumber?
People who believe that the availability of a seemingly never-ending sea of information is causing us to drown in that very sea, blame it on the specificity and partitioning of information found online. Before such technology was invented, one would spend hours searching for the piece of desired information. During these hours he would pick up various pieces of information that he came across unintentionally. Moreover, the contextualisation of this information would imply that it would be less likely to be misinterpreted. Thus the absence of specificity and partitioning could actually lead to a greater uptake of accurate information.
Proponents of the view that the ease of access to a humungous quantity of information does indeed make us smarter argue that the efficiency and ease with which we can obtain information results in a more knowledgeable society. The sheer amount of time we save when searching for information since the invention and development of the World Wide Web is truly amazing. This should then make more people want to put in the effort (which is minimal anyway!) to search for desired information and thus lead to a smarter society on the whole.
While there are myriad views on this subject, all with some validity, I’d like to argue that the availability of information is not making us smarter or dumber. Having access to information about any subject under the Sun gives us the option of choosing the object of our attention. While some of us choose to read up on world politics and the latest developments in science, others choose to read their friends’ wall-posts and status updates on ‘facebook’. On the whole we still possess an exponentially greater quantity of information than we did a few decades, or even a few years back. The real question is whether this increase in information content is desirable or not; Is it simply an increase in quantity without much regard for quality?
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