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Our generation is fcuked
Did you ever realize that our information is mostly from google searches? I doubt any of you read books anymore. Its easier to get somebody to summarize for you, so who needs the ability to think.....this is most strongly evidenced by the sheer quantity of copy and paste cheating going on these days...this is a result of being lazy asses who think they can learn by hitting a search term on google instead of spending some time learning...in other words, you dont know how to learn...
This isn't to all of you but its messed up how often this is true. Have things changed that much or is it just me?
This isn't to all of you but its messed up how often this is true. Have things changed that much or is it just me?
Comments
books do have its place in our lives.. but the problem in question is efficiency.. and people demand efficiency.. and if the internet increases efficiency.. it become part of the mainstream..=)
Books = waste of trees and ink + need storage
Which is better?
Siuying... you are right that the internet is a lot more efficient! that is why today's culture is flocking to it for everything from shopping to socializing and everything in between (can anyone say youtube) but at the same time, convenience should not come at the cost of knowledge
true knowledge isnt obtained by doing a search on google and writing it in an essay in words that make it appear that you understand the material. when really, it is wWIkiPedia that contains the knowledge and explained it to you in an dirty yet efficient way that everyone can now claim as theres
i love the internet and i love sharing but that shouldnt mean that shared ideas should be redistributed in essay form as your knowledge
malakaii...frreddom of speech is ENORMOUS and the internet has redefined the definition of truth...
but should these things come at the cost of the degradation of true knowledge??
Considering that most of the books everyone is referring to were written by dead white guys... How do we know if they are any more trustworthy than someone's blog? Just because they were published?
What about languages that do not have written forms? Stories that were passed from generation to generation changed based on the speaker. Does that devalue their importance?
Hell, even Hamlet is received differently based on the generation that reads it. I forget exactly what the timelines were, but some people who read it thought he was a slacker, while our generation finds him to be quite motivated.
We all see the world through our own perception based on what we've experienced. I'm just happy that anyone with a computer is able to get a message out now...
I read recently about a suicide hotline that used their website to raise thousands of dollars. Stuff like that happens all the time. It IS important, and we ARE making a difference.
malakaiii: cheers to you for raising the question about true knowledge.. =) it is pretty much subjective to those who experience it.. the knowledge is out there.. but our interpretations of it could be very different..
That's if we don't get blown up by terrorists , killed by our own governments, or sent to die in a desert for oil or a country's pride.
House prices are so astronomically high that we'll never be able to afford one unless we're either 32 or very rich.
And we're gonna get bombarded by advertising everywhere we go to make sure we all consume lots of shit we don't need
We've no work because they'd rather make some asian children do it for a tenth of the wage, then sell it back to us at stupid prices.
Soon we'll have no free healthcare.
Probably a while after that no free education either, they started with the universities.
you said it man, our generation is fucked...but for a lot more reasons than the internet
I mean, I agree with you that nothing will be free in the future. I think it is the government's fault....
And also, it will be more difficult for us to get good jobs and affordable housing.......
The internet is being used to post crap.....
Everything is getting more expensive......
People are coming up with new technology because they screwed up on the last one....
There seems to be more street people...
I can go on but the question is:
What is wrong with the world?:confused:
Tyler Durden: Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
I think this says it all. Heh. :tongue:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070622.wlteens22/BNStory/PersonalTech/home
The sheer volume of information available means that the old patterns of authority in education are slowly breaking down, but new ones have not yet fully formed.
But here's a good question:
If tomorrow half the world wide web shut right down, and all the search engines were offline, would you still be able to employ redundancies to look up information via other methods?
I think you'd be surprised at how much more mental labor you'd have to exercise in order to obtain that information and how arduous it would seem.
And then you should stop and realize that not even fifteen years ago, those older methods were still in use. Hell, my high school library back then still had actual cards in card catalogs, and the town's library stored its card catalog on microfiche, not in a computer. :tongue:
Point is? Things change. And almost never is it for the worse. Readily available information is never a bad thing. Never. The argument that having the information be TOO easily available somehow devalues the information, or that the long involved process of fact finding in the days of yore was somehow uplifting... it's bull.
There was a short time when the internet was too casual. It couldn't be used for academic purposes because there was no real system of verification; how do you know who wrote what you're reading, whether they are dependable, why you should believe what they're saying. Now, though, these problems are solved. All information is either clearly labelled as amateur content to be taken as merely a good starting point (wikipedia,) or is extensively cited to the academic standards.
Google and the so-called Information Age has absolutely changed the zeigeist tremendously, but I really can't see a single way in which it's been negative. Not, notice, the internet as a whole (the impact of myspace will be felt in crappy music for decades to come...) but the availability of information bit, by itself.
All this bollocks about quick access to information somehow being devaluing is just that . . . . . bollocks.
I mean the faster you can access information, the more time you have to learn it rather than spending time merely looking for it. I don't know if I could have survived being in university 15, 20 years ago when the internet did not exist as pervasively. I'm happy to be living in an age where one can get a hold information quickly.
To hell with character-building: work smarter, not harder!
To hell with those educationists who put forth the arguments of information being devalued because of faster access to it--bunch of bolloks all of that is!
That having been said it should be a humbling experience to realize that people as smart as you got things done with much less convenient means of access to information as recently as a decade ago.
Tangential reference:
In the "old days" of computer hardware, if you got a bollocks driver for something when you bought a peripheral, you usually had to write the manufacturer and hope they'd have updated the driver and send you a floppy disk. Or, if they were REALLY with the times, you'd dial long-distance to their BBS and use your spiffing 2400 baud modem to download the file. :tongue:
These days it's as simple as hitting the corporate website, and it takes all of about ten seconds to get the driver downloaded and updated.
It really is amazing how easy it is to do some things these days.