Anecdote

Brett Stinson

Professor Werry

RWS 100

11/20/14

Beginning in the early 1990’s the Internet has been making constant improvements to fix glitches, bugs and to overall improve its performance, with this came social media and a wide variety of websites for our own amusement and entertainment. In recent years many people debate whether or not the Internet has more positive or negative effects on human cognitive functions. As a student living in the golden age of technology and the Internet, I find myself using the Internet more often as I have to do homework, write papers and research online. Although I do the majority of my schoolwork online, it is not the primary use of my computer. Since the 7th grade I have been a semi-active user of the internet and have always had the social media accounts for the newest websites. For the majority of my life I have been using the internet for both business and pleasure and with this I feel as though I am not at the top of my mental capacity. Just as the Internet has ads and popups, my brain constantly has new ideas and thoughts coming up that it is nearly impossible to focus on one thing sometimes. This can make doing homework challenging when I am one tab away from seeing what parties are going or go and watch funny videos on Youtube.

Although  the Internet has brought so many forms of distractions it has also brought with it more knowledge than any one human can retain. The age of the internet has brought an idea of constant knowledge of what is going on around the world, you can now open up your phone and find out what your friends are doing or even learn about what is going on in any country around the world via news websites and even on social media. There is one tool that has proven to be most useful part of the internet, the power of everlasting knowledge. Despite one of the main forms of pleasure on the internet is social media, websites such as Wikipedia has introduced the ability to nearly instantly find out information about essentially anything you want to know. I find myself going on wikipedia for elongated periods of time just reading about people, places and events in history. This has mainly only shown benefits in normal conversation as I have the ability to recall odd facts that happen to relate to the topic of the conversation.

With my own observations of how the Internet has impacted my life and how it is connected to my skills in reading and writing, I have come to believe that the internet has more negatives than it has positives. Despite the Internet providing the tools to learn about practically anything, with this great power comes great responsibility. Responsibility being the ability to retain your sense of focus and not fall to the depths of social media. Social Media has brought misuse to the internet by plaguing the good intentions that Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf had in mind when birthing the internet. Just by observing how I manage my time while on the internet doing schoolwork compared to my time management while doing work on paper. Although the Internet is predominantly composed of informative sites, online shopping to save time in your everyday life and educational sites to help users of all ages in assisting them comprehend practically any task, the power of social media blankets the shine of the useful resources of the internet.