Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest

Everything is at our fingertips. With the push of a button, I could obtain the mass of the sun or learn about the fall of the League of Nations. It hardly takes any thought; it just takes a question. It doesn't even take much physical prowess to be able to look up a query. Prod a button. Scroll down on a mouse. Click. By all means, this should make the generations after the Internet Revolution more aware. And yet, our state exams are getting easier, education quality is going down the drain...why?

As exposure to Internet goes on, we are losing an ability to focus (we can't have too many social media accounts, of course not), we are losing an ability to think for ourselves, we are losing an ability to understand common courtesy and privacy, and above all, we are changing the way we think to more closely comply with technology. We don't own technology; technology owns us. Your computer has a perfect memory; you are gradually losing your ability. Your computer thinks but you can't come up with the answer yourself through reasoning. Your computer has all sorts of complicated passwords but the need to go on Facebook - an extremely impersonal site - to check on your friends and their activities is mind-boggling.

It sounds like the solution is to turn off Internet and swagger out into the world, alone and without your pal of forever but that won't help much because traditional media is quickly adapting itself to fit into a world of instant messaging, 3-4 paragraph blogs (according to a study, even those are skimmed), and movies on demand. The New York Times, for instance, has begun using the second and third page of each edition to an overview for "time-harried" readers. Perhaps we would have more time for such things if we got off the Internet. As time is going on, the e-books are increasing in popularity and Barnes and Noble, once reviled by the editing world, is now standing as a shield for traditional works, editors, and publishing agents.

When books were first produced, many were afraid that books would produce intellectual laziness - as is the case here. However, books sometimes come in large tomes, books don't shoot information at us at gunfire pace, and most importantly, books aren't capable of doing everything for us. When you go online, you are only seeing what you want to see. If you go on Google, Google shows you what they think you want, based on their assessment of your use of their services. On Twitter, you follow what you want to see on your feed. Why seek information that might derail your carefully orchestrated 140 character ideas?

Of course, the dominant view on the Internet is that of the dominant culture - white Caucasians. Is it really right that they're the primary things we see? Beauty on magazine covers, for instance, is dominated by a white perception of beauty.  K-pop is essentially the bubblegum pop of the American music scene over ten years ago and it's gradually becoming more similar to American music of today, except with less people and less music genres.

If so, what are we learning from the Internet?