Essay 4 – Negative effects of social media: lost the ability of independent thinking

In the article of Is Google Making Us Stupid, the author mentioned that he kind of lost the ability or patient for a long text book. And it did happen to me as well. I remember that when I was at high school, most of my time is spent at school having lessons and reading the text books and Even when I got home, I didn't use internet to assist my study a lot, which means that I study without the help of internet. As a matter of fact, most of my knowledge is accumulated during that time. I am not saying that internet might disturb my study, but I do assume that I couldn't have achieved it if I used internet a lot then, which is based on my situation now.

I feel like I depend too much on internet now, especially regarding to my study pattern. In the past, the focus of my learning is the knowledge itself including memorizing the principles or the explanations to the word or the text, the logical analysis steps for answering the certain questions, the practical usage of the knowledge and so on. And I answered every question by the knowledge in my mind or turn to the text book I had in hand or ask for my teacher or classmates' help, neither of which is internet. I was so independent of internet. And now, the focus of my learning is to find out all the relevant information to what I'm learning, since I think as long as I can get access to this information, I get the answer. So it is not necessary to memorize all of the text or go really deep into it, the only thing I need to do is to grasp the general ideas of it and some influential information relevant to the same area, which would make my learning more efficient. I did like this since I entered university, and I was indeed costumed to learn dependently on the internet.

However, I find that I am not that efficient like what I expected, since I was often got drowned by too much information, so most of my efforts are put on filtering the useful ones out of all, which are supposed to devote into independent thinking of answers or solutions. The initial aim of using Google or Wiki is to use that information to give me some inspiration, but it often ended up with an already available and even better solution than mine. So what I usually thought is why not I just adding something based on it instead of coming up with something else merely by myself.

That was just my story about internet changing my way of learning, but I do believe it is not just me, since it is just so easy to be caught by other's great ideas; it is so nature to follow those popular trends; it is so comfortable to just sit in a great and available conceptual idea framework; it is also so efficient to built up your own ideas just on other's great ones… Nothing cost nothing, so what might be the cost of such beautiful thing? I am afraid that it is our ability of independent thinking and future innovative ideas. And it is really disturbing to read the sentence like "The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children." which is form the article: Informing Ourselves to Death.

I would like to post a presentation here, which has very sharp opinions about the dark side of social media. In the last five minutes, the presenter talked about the downsides of social media, which is articulated better than my statements. So again, I think it is no need for me to say more, just let James Surowiecki to finish my arguments here. And it is being a paradox again, am I doing the right thing or not? What about you telling me when you finish the presentation.