I love the internet!
While some people use it for evil, I find it can also be a force for
good. There is SO MUCH information on it. I have always loved to learn and I have been
blessed with a fairly good memory. It is
not unheard of in my house for my husband (who is also extremely intelligent and
possesses a plethora of knowledge) to ask a question and with a little bit of
thought I am able to answer (granted, the subject of these questions is
normally a date or a music question). He
then asks “How do you remember all of this?”
I don’t know, I just do (my brothers and my father also have this
freakish aptitude for remembering trivial facts).
Tonight, while not sleeping, I was cruising the
internet. I was looking at some blogs
with historical information (Dear Reader, pick your jaw up off the floor). Some of this information even had scans of
the original books (which, to this history nerd, is AWESOME). It made me stop and think about how we take
the internet and its surplus of information for granted.
It’s so easy to find information today. All you have to do is Google it (or Bing or
whatever search engine you use). If you
are trying to find out how to do something, there is probably a blog with
step-by-step pictures or a YouTube video showing every minute detail. Need to find an obscure item? Just go to Amazon, Etsy, or Ebay to find
it! Information available with just the
click of a mouse!
Think about how much the world has changed in 20-25
years. Even in high school, if I needed
to write a report and cite sources, I first had to go to the library to find
said sources. Which meant a stop off at
the card catalogue to find out where in the library it was (side note - card
catalogues are even online now ). Then,
you would have to find the book and/or reference material. If you were lucky, there might be a key word
index in the book to help you find the needed information quickly. If not, you had to read (or at the very least
skim) the book.
I remember in the 10th grade doing a report on
Joan of Arc. I needed five different references. The library only had three (way to go me for
picking a historical figure so obscure).
I ended up getting permission to use the three I had plus an interview
of our French foreign exchange student to make four. How much easier would it have been to
research the report if I had had the modern internet “way back” then?
With all the information at our fingertips, we have to be
the most knowledgable society in history!
That would be the logical conclusion.
I am afraid that is not the case; just ask any high school teacher. Today’s youth have grown so accustomed to being
able to Google the information that they do not retain much of it. While I partly agree that there is no need to
memorize something if you can look it up, I also think it is important to have
a working knowledge of the subject so you can get along should something happen
to the internet. Think of it as having a
backup plan. For example, I can mash
potatoes with my electric mixer, but should the power go out, I can still mash
them with an old-fashioned potato masher.
Just some food for thought (pun not really intended, but it
does make me look rather clever).
Until Tomorrow - Melissa
Not just beautiful, but clever, too. :)
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