Introudction
Nowadays, internet has been growing for over twenty years and it leads human beings into the new age of life style and technology. People can have much more convenient instruments to maintain and support their daily life. For example, habitants can arrange their social life through the web, and which could solve distance and geographic problems. Nevertheless, there are many negative effects behind using internet popularly. For instance, people have less real relationships in the daily life. Especially for young generation, web is becoming the only one medium which they use to live in the real world. In this essay, the impact of virtual revolution would be evaluated and argued in two main areas which are the changes of human relationship and student thinking and learning.
The change of human relationship
Social network as a new type of information transfer and communication tools is influencing and changing the relationship between people and the world. As a communication platform between people, the network of a continuing communication of information is possible. It enhances the overall knowledge of human capabilities, the relationship among people and satisfies people‘s communication and understanding needs. Social network has become a major channel for people to obtain information. The world is getting smaller and smaller, such as Facebook to people communication provides an effective platform. The Facebook users can have more new friends through this website which can also promote relationship with their old friends. In other words, the network connects people very effectively.
Social network for mankind is a better understanding of themselves and the world in order to improve relationship between human and the world. Social network can be said to be an important way of ideological and political education. People visit these sites to participate in the activities of web site to help strengthen the moral consciousness and the status of the principal. Social network openness and convenience, the diversity and breadth of content is providing people with a vast space for learning so that it greatly broadens the means of people's quest for knowledge and also for people’s negative emotions release to provide a relatively relax environment. The establishment of online new human interpersonal approach and social relations for people provides a buffer space before they entering the real society. For young people social network is also providing a training ground which helps to promote the socialization of young people.
Although Internet brings many advantages to humans’ life, there are also some disadvantages which cannot be ignored. Firstly, when Internet improves the connection between people from different areas, the communication between them has been reduced much more. For example, in South Korea, because of its faster speed of Internet than any other areas else, most people spend more time on Internet than the others. Actually, it can make people connect friends or family much easier, but the traditional communication has become to disappear.
Communication with screen starts to replace communication face to face. Then human beings may lose much more valuable things. In the future, people may not know what the real relationship is. In South Korea, there are 210,000 people who will spend 18 hours on line each day. They have fell into Internet world instead of real world. In their eyes, they may not need real world any longer. Last year, there was a movie called Surrogates. In this movie, human beings use Internet to keep touch with others instead of the real communication skills. For a long time, people may not only lose real sensibility but also their soul.
Nowadays, more and more children touch Internet when they are very young. Then Internet will take their much time. The result of this is that communication between children and parents has been reduced much more. In fact, Internet has started to destroy people’s family. When the children grow up, parent-child relationship may be not clear. On the other hand, about the relation between strangers, there is a sample about restaurant in the video. The Facebook of the restaurant in the video has many followers. These Facebook members just have relationship with the writer of Facebook. They do not have real friendship with this restaurant. If this writer disappears, this relationship will disappear too.
Secondly, much negative knowledge has been shown when Internet supplies the information that people need. With popular of Internet, when people have some questions they may ask “friends” on line. But they may not find the right answers. Contrarily, wrong way or some dangerous things may be supplied to them. At that time, Internet will not give people useful information but negative help. So when people use Internet, they should know that Internet just a tool to help human. It is just a tool.
The change of student thinking and learning
Obviously, internet becomes a new media. People could access internet conveniently. They could download and upload anything everywhere. To compare the generation of using print media and printing press, creating and releasing information or knowledge on web are not only by professionals, but also by everyone who could access internet. The roles of ideas, knowledge and information are decentralized. According to the BBC program of “The virtual Revolution: Homo Interneticus”, Carr (2008) described this is information overload generation. New generation is growing with plenty of information in real-time society. Therefore, it is interesting to argue that how does the speedy evolution of internet affect student growing and learning?
Firstly, there is a main problem that student’s thinking is destroyed. Student, nowadays, uses internet for entertainment as well as searching information. It is effective and efficient to search by using key words. Student could use less time to find more information whatever they need on world wide web which created by Bush (1945) Also, the hyper links which linking one pieces of information to another help student to click subject to subject easily. However, these not only make them lazier, but also distract their thinking. When searching one thing, the hyper links or searching lists distract from what they are looking for and make people unable to concentrate. (Keen, 2007) Although this computer system is copied from human brain’s associate thinking concept, people find difficult to go back from linear thinking. Linear thinking is important for student learning and studying. Learning step-by-step is good for strengthen broad-based knowledge. When young people learn some concepts and theories, linear thinking strongly helps them to understand knowledge by process and deepen memories.
Secondly, internet fosters student learning attitude. According to the BBC test in its program, young generation spent 1/6 times of the elderly on one page to find data. They are not willing to stand in a site or one page for long. Most of student do not want to spend time on reading books and never read things in details. (Runciman and Nicholas) They are more likely to search information online and copy other’s ideas. Therefore, students in digital generation are lazier and study without their own thinking and opinion. It is believed that in foreseeable future, the quality and ability of our next generation will drop.
On the other hand, internet still bring new generation a lot of advantages. Internet has become an indispensible means for young people, the web surfing is the basic skill with all of them. People’s sense and imagination is mostly form screen, they often increase their creativity when they have seen from internet. For example, The Youtube website creates a lot of video and makes people to get lots innovations and comments when they view other people’s compositions. In addition, using blog is also encourage students writing, they usually practice their writing skill when they search other people’s own words, although it is not formal, they are more likely to write rather than handwriting daily.
The development of Internet is not only interesting for young people’s life but also affects them to learning and accesses some boring areas, such as political and medical technology. It offers young students have lost experience to contact the thing they are unfamiliar. At the same time, student may interflow with each other’s thinking and idea. The real-time benefit could make them get a great deal of new information as well as new knowledge which replace the old one.
Time is changing; the internet has been essential to human life. It helps people link to entire world and reach to any distant places. Consequently, internet changes the way of communication and make turn the world into a single community
Conclusion
To sum up, indeed, internet has been influencing people's life enormously. Inevitably, this revolution would be continuously and bring controversy over the advantages and disadvantages. However there are many serious and negative effects revealed through the basic of human lifestyle that would be the juncture to rebuild and improve the internet system. For example, reinforce the correct conception of using web by education. On the other hand, this trend could be an opportunity for marketers to develop marketing strength. As evidence of this, marketers can reach their target audiences by applying World of Mouth, such as Youtube to influence young generation or advocate the right concept of using network.
Reference:
BBC (2009), “The virtual Revolution: Homo Interneticus” [online] Available from
Bush, V. (1945) ‘As we may think’, Interaction, 3(2), 35 - 46
http://net.pku.edu.cn/~course/cs410/reading/bush_aswemaythink.pdf
Carr, N.G (2008) ‘Is Google Making us stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains’ The Atlantic magazine
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9962935-16.html
Keen, A. (2007) The cult of the amateur: how today's internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy, London: Nicholas Brealey
Nicholas, D. Director of CIBER, UCL
Runciman, D. Political scientist, Cambridge University
5 comments:
So do you think its a positive or negative impact on the social structure?
Husni
A well written essay which points out both positive and negative consequences of using internet and how such an technology is becoming an important part of our daily life.
Well written. Some good examples to. Do you guys think we've reached the top or is it in the future even going to be worse than now (the use of internet,...)? Good work!
hi friends
please find two essential Morgen and Hunt's literature through our blog.
we hope it will be useful to you
best regards
e-shoppers
www.etradersworl.blogspot.com
Thank you for your reading, giving feedback and providing more useful and interesting source such as Morgen and Hunt's literature.
For social structure, it seems quite negative. Social network, such as Facebook, is changing what is relationship and friendship. We could have a thousand of friends on Facebook but they are not really our friends. “The huge number of relationship is not really relationship” Bobin Dunbar said. We add and invite those people to be our friends because we know them only. We would like to know their new status or new look rather than caring them. It is not friendship in real life. They are not our friends but they are our topic in social community. Basically, we found friendship is often the result of a friend demonstrating the tendency to desire what is best for the other, mutual understanding, sympathy and empathy as well as honesty, perhaps in situations where it may be difficult for others to speak the truth, especially in terms of pointing out the perceived faults of one's counterpart. In internet world, friendship is only about action and reaction as well as a sense of bonding which linking people becomes a wide social network.
In addition, it changes people psychologically. It is a challenging “who we are”. People now pretend who they are rather than living as their natural self. In Facebook status updates, they tend to type something that they want to pretend. They want to control how people feel them. Sherry Turkle said people are more likely to present themselves through internet. They type their status as “I want to make a feeling, so I need to make a call” rather than “I have a feeling, so I make a call.” This phenomenon is not good for our psychological selves. People live without genuine. For long time, they might lose themselves and could not find individual and personal real selves. They might feel confusing “who they are” and “who they want to act as”.
In the future, we think it is going to be worse than now. People ate still finding a lot of fun on the use of internet. Also, they are interested in developing more about internet world. They prefer to develop more useful and convenient technology rather than avoiding the risk affecting actual life. People seem accept the negative outcome from internet and think “the outcome is not too worse, we could ignore”, “the outcome is not more important that internet development.” or “the advantages of internet is more than the disadvantages”.
Post a Comment