EQnoble
Well-known member
I agree with this for the reason that when there is a problem involving people the problem is almost always the people.
Is the internet making people more stupid?
- Thread starter Adam Howard
- Start date
CTXMedia
Well-known member
Faction:
1. A group of persons forming a cohesive, usually contentious minority within a larger group.
2. Conflict within an organization or nation; internal dissension
Did you mean factual?
1. Of the nature of fact; real.
2. Of or containing facts.
The internet turns people into crap spellers and great pedants in equal measure too ... and that's a faction!!
Fun and joking aside, it's up to the reader to apply some reason and logic to what is being said / what they are seeing / reading. As a great philosopher once said: "Stupid is as stupid does!"
I don't think the Internet makes people more stupid, it's just that there's more access to hearsay and supposition and stupid people fall for it. If you give everyone the opportunity to say whatever they want - you're going to get a lot of crap printed / posted - but the flip side is you'll get a lot of good stuff too; different ideas and thinking, a different side to a story, a perception you might not have considered yourself.
Historically books were expensive so you didn't just get any old rubbish printed - it had to have some value and quality - but that's all changed now so the reader has to be more objective.
I prefer it this way though - it's more interesting.
Morgain
Well-known member
Adam and EQ particularly thank you for such substantial and thoughtful posts. EQ you are a giant.
I was part of the fairly early www - went online 1996.
At first it was very idealistic, and favoured thoughtfulness and freethinking, it seemed to me. Also some chatrooms I used were powerfully supportive when I and my family webt through a nasty brush with death. this showed me a soaring potential for community.
Within a few years as I became an online educator, the commercial interests moved in. The early idealists deplored this but it was inevitable. Search hits were more likely to offer sales pages than info pages so you had to hunt a bit, or quite a lot.
Wikipedia started, which I had mixed feelings about. I loved the sharing of info in an oceanic pool. But I detested the pretence of objectivity which was outdated, and falsely led readers to think that 'facts' were definite. Also text was not attributed so there is little scope to identify a writer's bias. Finally Wiki was in fact very biased without owning it. (I left Wiki quite soon) Nonetheless it's a useful starter for a topic you don't know as long as you check everything.
Then came campaigns, social networking, dating, FB, twit etc etc along with an avalanche of porn and prostitution.
As said above much of this development has mirrored the outer society.
I think it is easy to get a distorted impression of how many educated people there are. In f2f life, we tend to mix with people of broadly similar levels of education. If you're a trained thinker that creates a bubble that is actually very small. Any experiences of mixing with random people - airports. motorway services, brings that out and it can be a shock. So the net does no more than give access to the large number of less educated people who become a bit more obvious.
One phenomenon I think is critical is the dumbing down of education since 1980. The effects really started to be felt by the 90s until by 2000 the general capacity for discussion was very poor indeed. Most experiences I had online around then were marked with abusive passages, and an awful lot of snippy little nothing comments. I suppose a lot of that once on email lists and forums is now on FB or Twit.
The education systems in UK and USA have become ever worse. Learning by rote has made a comeback. Islamic incursions do not help as modern Islamic studies (unlike historical Islam in Granada) do not train in critical thought and questioning.
Exams now set for 18s are the level of exams once set for 16s or 15s. The exam I did at 11 now appears in 16s exam papers!
I am not going to review the politics and economics of this as that is a heated debate which will derail us. Enough to say that almost half our UK young people now leave school functionally illiterate - very minimum literacy. Jobs if you can get them have also been dumbed down to robot pree button/ tick box level to reduce wages.
In the early 00s years I knew despair at the stupidity spreading around. However I held a faint hope that the net promoted discussion - forums, news blogs, other blogs. Could people learn from this? I hoped so.
I think that has happened, and is still happening.
For example the comments on news articles were 10 - 5 years ago pretty abysmal. Poorly informed, and illogical. But the standard has zoomed so that now the comments can often be better informed than the original journalist. The standard of courtesy both there and elsewhere is vastly improved. Considering the awful stress, fear, humiliation, and deprivations people are coping with, that is awesome.
It's still a problem that information is distorted. But wasn't it always so? Read a news item when you were there - the report is often strangely but predictably different. Empires like Murdoch rule, with certain values.
It can be fun to see the Daily Mail grind out its prejudiced articles, and see how the huge majority of comments disagree and many can argue the case!
What is hopeful is that there are alternatives, radical and specialist sites which get passed around the networks of personal interest.
On research yes I do have to plough through a lot of misinformation. That is no different to library research offline with the huge difference that i can cut through a load of crap in hours or days that once took me weeks or years.
Comparing statements, tracing original sources, these are classic research skills more necessary than ever because of the quantity of material.
I was part of the fairly early www - went online 1996.
At first it was very idealistic, and favoured thoughtfulness and freethinking, it seemed to me. Also some chatrooms I used were powerfully supportive when I and my family webt through a nasty brush with death. this showed me a soaring potential for community.
Within a few years as I became an online educator, the commercial interests moved in. The early idealists deplored this but it was inevitable. Search hits were more likely to offer sales pages than info pages so you had to hunt a bit, or quite a lot.
Wikipedia started, which I had mixed feelings about. I loved the sharing of info in an oceanic pool. But I detested the pretence of objectivity which was outdated, and falsely led readers to think that 'facts' were definite. Also text was not attributed so there is little scope to identify a writer's bias. Finally Wiki was in fact very biased without owning it. (I left Wiki quite soon) Nonetheless it's a useful starter for a topic you don't know as long as you check everything.
Then came campaigns, social networking, dating, FB, twit etc etc along with an avalanche of porn and prostitution.
As said above much of this development has mirrored the outer society.
I think it is easy to get a distorted impression of how many educated people there are. In f2f life, we tend to mix with people of broadly similar levels of education. If you're a trained thinker that creates a bubble that is actually very small. Any experiences of mixing with random people - airports. motorway services, brings that out and it can be a shock. So the net does no more than give access to the large number of less educated people who become a bit more obvious.
One phenomenon I think is critical is the dumbing down of education since 1980. The effects really started to be felt by the 90s until by 2000 the general capacity for discussion was very poor indeed. Most experiences I had online around then were marked with abusive passages, and an awful lot of snippy little nothing comments. I suppose a lot of that once on email lists and forums is now on FB or Twit.
The education systems in UK and USA have become ever worse. Learning by rote has made a comeback. Islamic incursions do not help as modern Islamic studies (unlike historical Islam in Granada) do not train in critical thought and questioning.
Exams now set for 18s are the level of exams once set for 16s or 15s. The exam I did at 11 now appears in 16s exam papers!
I am not going to review the politics and economics of this as that is a heated debate which will derail us. Enough to say that almost half our UK young people now leave school functionally illiterate - very minimum literacy. Jobs if you can get them have also been dumbed down to robot pree button/ tick box level to reduce wages.
In the early 00s years I knew despair at the stupidity spreading around. However I held a faint hope that the net promoted discussion - forums, news blogs, other blogs. Could people learn from this? I hoped so.
I think that has happened, and is still happening.
For example the comments on news articles were 10 - 5 years ago pretty abysmal. Poorly informed, and illogical. But the standard has zoomed so that now the comments can often be better informed than the original journalist. The standard of courtesy both there and elsewhere is vastly improved. Considering the awful stress, fear, humiliation, and deprivations people are coping with, that is awesome.
It's still a problem that information is distorted. But wasn't it always so? Read a news item when you were there - the report is often strangely but predictably different. Empires like Murdoch rule, with certain values.
It can be fun to see the Daily Mail grind out its prejudiced articles, and see how the huge majority of comments disagree and many can argue the case!
What is hopeful is that there are alternatives, radical and specialist sites which get passed around the networks of personal interest.
On research yes I do have to plough through a lot of misinformation. That is no different to library research offline with the huge difference that i can cut through a load of crap in hours or days that once took me weeks or years.
Comparing statements, tracing original sources, these are classic research skills more necessary than ever because of the quantity of material.
Adam Howard
Well-known member
Faction:
1. A group of persons forming a cohesive, usually contentious minority within a larger group.
2. Conflict within an organization or nation; internal dissension
Did you mean factual?
1. Of the nature of fact; real.
2. Of or containing facts.
The internet turns people into crap spellers and great pedants in equal measure too ... and that's a faction!!
Auto-correct. Successfully owning my productivity since it's inception.
This came up else where and the question that followed was......
What if the reader is completely clueless on the subject of information they seek, without no alternative outside source to obtain further information except through The Internet... And The Internet repeats the same wrongful information again and again; how is anyone to make an educated "guess" of conductive reasoning when 500+ sources have it wrong and 1 lone source has it right?
I like your way of thinking and agree.
Of course the argument that was made was that with so much hearsay and stupidity, more people are voicing themselves and following along in such a manner that it's no longer valued what is right or wrong, but rather who can win the debate....ie... Produce a more convincing truth. So you end up having less facts and more "truth" of what is to be believed.
Kim
Well-known member
The internet has made people less patient, more demanding of instant gratification, no matter what endeavour they may be pursuing, we want it... and we want it NOW.
The accesss to so much information at our fingertips has also made us lazier, and less inclined to seek out information elsewhere, to read more widely on any given topic.
In that I think it has contributed to a dumbing down. But it has also contributed so much, I agree with those that said earlier that it is a tool, and anything is only what we choose to make of it.
The accesss to so much information at our fingertips has also made us lazier, and less inclined to seek out information elsewhere, to read more widely on any given topic.
In that I think it has contributed to a dumbing down. But it has also contributed so much, I agree with those that said earlier that it is a tool, and anything is only what we choose to make of it.
SneakyDave
Well-known member
What World Wide Web were you on in the late 80's?
If we didn't know better, this would have been reported as spam.
Adam Howard
Well-known member
.com domain names have been around since 1985
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com
symbolics.com became the first registered domain. They're still online
Many people use the terms Internet and World Wide Web (the Web) interchangeably, but in fact the two terms are not synonymous. The Internet and the Web are two separate but related things.
The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.
The World Wide Web (Web for short) is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet. The Web uses the HTTP protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the Internet, to transmit data. Web services, which use HTTP to allow applications to communicate in order to exchange business logic, use the the Web to share information. The Web also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, to access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks. Web documents also contain graphics, sounds, text and video.
The Web is just one of the ways that information can be disseminated over the Internet. The Internet, not the Web, is also used for e-mail, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP. So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.
Sheldon
Well-known member
Could you also link this part you blatantly plagiarized?
SneakyDave
Well-known member
I'll try it a simpler way...
What World Wide Web were you on in the late 80's? I know the wikipedia definition and history. I'm not sure you do.
You didn't mention domain names. You mentioned the WWW. Are you suggesting that you were in DARPA when you were 10 years old?
Fufu
Well-known member
I have read countless PhD dissertations on how people are stupid because of the internet. But now, the realization that a lot of information we memorize is pointless to learn in traditional school. The internet serves a better purpose for archiving knowledge without needing to remember unimportant pieces of information that has no relevance to our daily lives.
Andrej
Well-known member
http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2002/Web_vs_Internet.asp
Nice copy-paste without linking to the source.
BirdOPrey5
Well-known member
This. It doesn't make people stupid, it makes stupid people more visible.
Markos
Well-known member
Nice spam post.
Morgain
Well-known member
Possibly but an important topic worth serious consideration so a good starter.
Brandon Sheley
Well-known member
Lone Fox
Member
Well, I'm not sure what to say... I'm somewhat stupid myself.
The internet has created a "I know it all" mentality. I've also noticed a trend where someone will post a link to a Wikipedia page; Wikipedia is a very nice website, but I've lost count how many corrections I've contributed to that site. I still find mistakes here and their, but no longer contribute.
Then you have eHow
Is it coincidental that I use my AOL eMail account whenever I'm asked to give my email account? I'd hate for my Gmail account to get overridden with spam email.
The internet has created a "I know it all" mentality. I've also noticed a trend where someone will post a link to a Wikipedia page; Wikipedia is a very nice website, but I've lost count how many corrections I've contributed to that site. I still find mistakes here and their, but no longer contribute.
Then you have eHow
Is it coincidental that I use my AOL eMail account whenever I'm asked to give my email account? I'd hate for my Gmail account to get overridden with spam email.
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