Does the Internet Degrade Its Cognitive Quality of the User - Essay Example

?This is the version of your essay that I modified. Please revise this essay with instructions below: Make a paragraph break if needed (Some paragraphs are too long and can actually be separated into 2 paragraphs). And if separating the paragraphs resulting short and shallow paragraphs, please elaborate more on the ideas. Please include good transition at the beginning of each paragraph. Strengthen and expand the second last paragraph, please include evidence or supporting ideas. Please expand the last paragraph (conclusion). A good conclusion paragraph should: restate or rephrase thesis, summarize, includes further thought on the issues and its future impacts, includes concern for further studies. This paper is supposed to be a research opinion paper, so you are right to change this into a more argumentative one. Please strengthen this paper if possible by adding strong arguments, providing great coherence of logic flow, or including thought-provoking ideas. Does The Internet Degrade Its User’s Cognitive Quality? The internet is extremely prevalent these days; it has transformed human life from a normal life to a digital life. There are no life segments, in which the influence of internet is negligible. Business, education, communication, healthcare, culture and politics are some areas in which internet brought huge changes. The entire world is now divided into real world and virtual world. The activities going on the virtual world are almost equal in magnitude with the activities going on in the real world. In short, internet has made plenty of changes in the physical world. The influence of internet is not limited to the physical world alone; even mental activities undergo rapid changes. One of affected mental activities is people’s cognitive skills; cognitive skills are brain-based skills that include set of abilities that are part of human actions. It involves logic, attention, memory, and perception. The efficiency and convenience that the internet provides is utilized by people in order to make their life much easier. Comparing internet research to hours of turning book pages to find relevant information and noting them down, the latter seems like a laborious and time-consuming task. After all, the internet provides relevant information from thousands of sources altogether in just a matter of seconds. But without being realized, it serves as a double-edged sword where it overindulges our brain and ruins our cognitive ability. The internet has made our lives much easier, but along with that it has degraded our cognitive quality. Being a student in this tech savvy generation, I am completely aware of the role the internet plays in our lives. In fact today’s youth cannot even imagine getting through schools and colleges without the internet. The internet helps to complete academic tasks more easily because we have easy access to every piece of information one can ever imagine; it is all just a click away. The internet serves as huge library where one has access to information from all corners of the world. Even though lack of good editorial committees has flooded the internet with wrong information, the convenience of using the net to seek something, continues to be a preferred choice over browsing through books and journals. With the realization that using the internet to search for information is pretty convenient, people are becoming overly dependent on it, and slowly, their reasoning and problem solving skills are dropping. The internet provides readymade answers to all problems; therefore a student or researcher does not feel the need to think much about solving a problem. On the other hand, generations in the past were forced to think deeply to analyze different dimensions of a problem before identifying proper solution for that. The easiness in solving problem with the help of internet causes mental idleness. According to a study conducted by Karin Slegers, a Cognitive Psychologist, older adults who rely on the internet lose their cognitive functions much faster than their counterparts who do not (Slegers, 2009). In other words, the influence of internet on human life prohibits our brain to reach its full potential; but it is not solely the brain’s potential that is hampered, even the analyzing power of the human mind is threatened, A human mind is best known for their critical analyzing skill which is the reason behind the ability of humans to think, understand and solve. It is needless to say that humans are losing their keen analytical abilities to the internet. To understand this, imagine that one has a tiger cub at home. The owner provides the cub with food daily and the cub slowly becomes accustomed to it. If now it is left in the wild, the cub will have diminished hunting instincts and may fail to survive because of lack of hunting skills. Similarly, today we are spoon-fed information. The power of browsing, skimming and selecting has degraded the mental analyzing skills. Youth today who are dependent on the internet may have to suffer on the long run because according to Wurman (1990), use of internet information deprives one from a sense of control and blocks the brain from making appropriate decisions. The internet presents a whole lot of information but one does not practically require such huge amount of information. The humongous amount of relevant information leads to what is known as “information overload” where the individual is pushed into a state of confusion when it comes to selection of data. Thus, the individual becomes confused and is rendered unable to take correct decisions owing to which he may use less valuable information over more relevant and important ones. If the state of “information overload” continues a person may lose the ability to think and make correct decision when needed and fail to reason logically. However, while collecting information from more traditional sources we are well aware about the limited resources and we are not confused and hence we exercise our minds to correctly identify the most appropriate ones. This helps us to retain the decision-making ability and logical reasoning. In spite of this, the mere convenience of the web has taken the place of books in our lives. As the internet has replaced traditional method to search for information, it has also changed the way we perceive information through readings, and as a result, it ruins our ability to concentrate. In the days when the internet had not taken over the world, people would read magazines and books which helped them pay attention and read something for a longer time. This was a great contributor when it comes to cognitive abilities, since paying attention and concentrating are of great importance. Even children would read story books and novels for entertainment and hone their concentration skills. But after the interception of the World Wide Web, the ability of the mind to concentrate on a particular matter has diminished. Even though a writer such as Cowen Tyler in his essay “Three Tweets for the Web” says that the internet has lengthened ones concentration and attention span, I completely disagree with him (2009). He points out that there has never been a golden age where all readers are so attentive; but at least, the internet has made us so attentive to information out there. He states that the internet has made it easier to browse for both old and new information that people begin to pay more attention to the information. Personally, I think that our brain today has been trained to such a degree that we are always on the lookout for relevant and important matter. We find it utterly unnecessary to read long things and often are always after a shorter version. We have become so accustomed to shorter versions of everything that reading long things seem tedious and useless. Among the youngsters today, updating and chatting have become a round-the-clock activity which has also depreciated their abilities to concentrate on something for a particular length of time. The base point that we all overlook is the fact that our attention span has been reduced. But Tyler’s point of view is challenged by Nicholas Carr in “Is Google making us stupid?”, “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense”. Basically, he clearly indicates that though internet users’ seem to read more, their reading is like skimming where they look and choose the things that they need rather than actually sitting down and understanding something. Therefore, while using the internet surely gets purposes fulfilled in the blink of an eye, the ability to concentrate on passages and critically judge information is omitted. The internet has not merely hampered our senses and reasoning but is inflicting more severe damage than that is superficially visible. It is suppressing our creativity, limiting it and prohibiting it to reach its full potential. Creativity is one of best attributes of the human mind. The human mind has the potential to think beyond barriers and make something new, something original. Beautiful poems, stories, lyrics and even the art of drawing or painting are the marks of creativity and originality. However, in the present era of internet usage, originality is immensely limited. Today, if I am supposed to give a speech on my mom’s birthday party or at any occasion, the first thing that pops up in my mind is to search for a speech. Millions of speeches are uploaded on the World Wide Web and all one has to do is to look for one, choose it and make appropriate alterations such as names or dates. This is the case with most youngsters today, because they rely on the internet for everything. Most of us will not exercise our minds and come up with something original at all. We would all either copy a speech or a message entirely or in parts. Though this may not seem as very big issue, the hidden fact is that the creativity is lost. Being spoon fed by the internet has diminished the ability of the mind to imagine and create new things. According to a report, Trevor Bayliss, an inventor has warned that too much usage of the internet will leave children “brain-dead” (Stevens, 2012). Creativity is rooted in childhood where children learn to make things with bare hands, draw and color and usage of the internet is slowly putting a stop to all the traditional means of learning. In the future, this may also hamper human civilization as since childhood, children develop a sense of dependence on the internet where everything that is present is nothing new, and as a result they will find it difficult to create something original. Another concern on the internet is on how it has kept us away from books. The web, replacing books in general has taken away some advantages that books provide .As taking shortcuts becomes a habit, it is very hard to get rid of the habit because our brain becomes accustomed to receiving information easily The internet presents everything relevant to the search in a matter of seconds whereas manual searching is much more time consuming; It should be noted that while a person search for a particular information in a book, lot of others things may pass through his eyes. Thus, he is getting more than what he actually looking for while using a book for the reference purpose. On the other hand, while using internet, he will get only the details of the particular information he is looking for. In other words, internet provides specific information whereas books provide general information. Thus internet makes specialists whereas books makes one an all-rounder. Hence, the internet takes away people’s opportunity to gain more knowledge. Another major way in which the internet is annihilating the habit of reading books and hampering the valuable though process, is internet addiction, where people especially the youth are engaged in playing online games or social networking or simply browsing websites for hours at a stretch without a set goal in mind. Some may argue that social networking helps people to reach out and express their thoughts and ideas more freely but the ill effects of such internet addiction must also be taken into account. Uncontrolled addiction to the internet and spending a considerable amount of time online, affects the cognition of a person by making them unable to distinguish between reality and representation. According to extensive research conducted, it has been shown that if internet behavior is not monitored or controlled, it is more likely that the youth will lose the ability to make correct choices between good and bad and indulge in anti-social behavior (Keung Ma, 2011) thereby proving the fact that internet can limit cognition. Often, Internet aficionados claim that internet usage increases both cognitive development and learning because of the availability of interactive learning, where information is presented through multimedia, which stimulates sensory and motor abilities. Van Dijk, in his book The Network Society supports the fact the learning has become better through interactive digitalization of information (Van Dijk, 2012). Though this might be true for certain aspects of learning the internet has also stimulated a “copy-paste” generation by contracting the span of attention and concentration (Dreyfus, 1999) which totally contradicts the aspect of learning since copying and pasting are far simpler process than the entire act of learning no matter how simply and logically presented. It is an undeniable fact that the internet is a boon and is slowly emerging into an indispensable part of our day-to-day lives. It helps make our lives much easier and perform tasks much faster thereby enabling us to become more efficient. However, amidst all the good contributions that the internet has made, it is logical to think that it destroys the cognitive abilities of its users in one way or another. It prevents people from thinking deeply about the problems they face thereby preventing them from developing their mental skill. Keen analytical and problem solving skills are also hampered. The over influence of internet on human life has resulted in lack of creativity in the minds of people. Moreover, the easiness in solving problems with the help of internet made the current generation vulnerable to the hard realities of life. It is needless to say that if the current trend of over-dependence on the internet continues to increase we should be ready to lose the future innovative, creative and inquisitive minds. Like everything else the internet also has two sides. One good and considered a boon while the other harmful, therefore considered a bane. In short, in spite of the various positive impacts internet usage has, it must not be forgotten that the mental abilities of the current generation are not growing properly because of the influence of internet. Works Cited List: Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid? The Atlantic. N.P., 1 July 2008. Web. 16 May 2013. Cowen, Tyler. "The Wilson Quarterly: Three Tweets for the Web by Tyler Cowen." The Wilson Quarterly. Woodrow Wilson International center for scholars, 2009. Web. 16 May 2013. Dijk, Jan. The Network Society: Social Aspects of New Media. 2nd ed. London: Sage Publications, 2000. Print. Dreyfus, Hubert L. "Anonymity versus commitment: The dangers of education on the internet."Ethics and information technology 1.1 (1999): 15-20. Print. Keung ma, Hing. "Internet Addiction and Antisocial Internet Behavior of Adolescents." Scientific World journal 11 (2011): 2187-2196. Print. Slegers, K, et al. "Effects of computer training and internet usage on cognitive abilities in older adults: a randomized controlled study." Aging clinical and experimental research21.1 (2009): 43-54. Print. Stevens, John. "Inventor warns 'Google generation who spend life in front of screens are losing creativity and skills'." Mail Online. N.p., 25 Dec. 2012. Web. 16 May 2013. Van Dijk, Jan A. G. M.. The Network Society. London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2012. Print. Wurman, Richard S. Information Anxiety: What to Do When Information Doesn't Tell You What You Need to Know. New York: Bantam, 1990. Print. Read More