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I was just required to write my thoughts about whether technology is helping us more than harming us for my Composition class and I think this would be a rather interesting debate to hold in TL. Now, lets keep all the eSports related thoughts out of this debate as it is clear that the internet can only help eSports. 
So, before we begin, I must require you to read the following articles (not really as they are really long, but they serve as a very powerful source of information for this debate):
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-565207/Modern-technology-changing-way-brains-work-says-neuroscientist.html
So, now that you have read them (if you selected to), lets have a great discussion based around the ideas behind the articles.
Is technology, specifically the internet, harming us or helping us?
The following was my view on the issue:
+ Show Spoiler +Is Google Making us Stupider? The answer is simple to find when you "Google it," even simpler to to find within the article by Nicholas Carr. In the article, Carr presents the reader with an alarming message, the Internet is harming us. Carr provides the readers with comparisons between his past and his present when he mentions how he used to be able to spend longer intervals of time on a long article or book while now in the present he is gets easily distracted after a few moments of continuous reading. Carr then goes on to provide additional examples of how the Internet is not only affecting him negatively, but also his friends and how a study conducted by scholars from University College London suggests that his problem is a common happening in our society. At this point on his article he is successfully achieving his goal of convincing the reader that the internet is affecting us in a negative way.
Yet, also in the article, Carr writes about how the existence of the internet, more specifically Google, has helped him be more productive at his work than he used to be before, and how now days everyone, thanks to the internet, is reading more today than in the 1970s or 1980s. Carr has not only contradicted his original claim, but also provided evidence that his article is biased against the internet.
Technology like the internet has allowed us to expand and improve our way of thinking, learn new things, and process what we know. Carr mentions in his article how the greater amount of reading done today is actually a different kind of reading than in the past. I believe that this different reading done today is an improved form of reading. Knowledge is accessible faster than ever to everyone and the amount of knowledge is also greater than before, increasing at a greater rate than earlier. This means that thanks to technology, the way our brains process information is constantly evolving.
I am not going to commit Carr’s error by pretending that my personal experiences apply to everyone in the world. Personally, I have never been able to read out of a book. I do not find it appealing and I quickly lose interest on the book I am reading. The small amount of reading I do from within a book, I have to read multiple times in order to vaguely retain its information. Quite the opposite happens to me whenever I am reading things in a digital media. No matter how long, or short, an article, or book I have found online is, I always make sure to read it from its beginning to its end, especially when whatever I am reading I selected it due to personal interest on the subject. I can easily spend multiple hours reading research articles, news articles, online books per day while I would not be able to do any of this if I was to read it off a physical object; I would just skim over it at best. Thanks to my preference of digital over physical, I am able to gather information in a more efficient way and retain it too.
The internet has also allowed me to share important readings with others instantly. Whenever I find an article that I believe others would consider to be interesting, all I have to do to share it with everyone is to simply copy the web address and share it with whomever I would like to. We now possess the technology to share our knowledge instantly with others and are now able to think in a more precise way than before as now we expand each other’s knowledge through reading the plethora of information there is online and share our thoughts on the subject through the internet.
Just like everything else, the internet can be used for good as it can be used for bad. The best example for this I can think of is bomb making. In the past it was extremely difficult to find information about how to create an explosive. Now days, there exists a plethora of information about bomb making.
Suasan Greenfield says in her article, Modern technology is changing the way our brains work, says neuroscientist, that she is ‘optimistic and excited by what future research will reveal into the workings of the human brain, and the extraordinary process by which it is translated into a uniquely individual mind. But I'm also concerned that we seem to be so oblivious to the dangers that are already upon us.” I relate with her statement completely. The future is indeed exiting, and seems to be one of technological progress. Yet, there exist present dangers that threaten our technological progress. Threats that have been created by the evolution of technology. Technology can be used for bad, or for good. So far it seems that a technology such as the internet is mainly beneficial to society.
  
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being able to access unlimited amounts of information in a small amount of time can never harm us in my opinion.
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Technology is helping us, technology has always helped us. Technology is the reason why you are alive.
As for the internet, it allows us to transfer information and ideas across the world. It unifies humanity and sets our ideas free.
Those articles you linked are opinion pieces, they are not scientific articles nor do the accurately summarise any peer reviewed literature on the matter, so I would take them with a grain of salt. Furthermore your opinion on the matter seems to be backed up by personal anecdotes of other people not by any solid evidence.
It seems to me that the Luddites have got to you. What a shame.
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Exactly your title. Helping or harming - depends on how you use it  .
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On January 30 2012 17:16 dAPhREAk wrote:
being able to access unlimited amounts of information in a small amount of time can never harm us in my opinion.
counterproof: reddit
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The internet is simply a tool - like a hammer. It neither inherently hurts or helps someone. It only does what ever purpose someone gives it. If it's to to learn, then it's to learn. If it's to harm, then it's to harm.
If someone stupid smashes their thumb with a hammer, it's their own damn fault. If someone uses the internet and becomes stupider.... It's their own damn fault.
It's like in Spiderman when Peter Parker's grandpa says "With great power, comes great responsibility." If you have the power to get information, you also have a responsibility to use that information correctly. If you don't and it some how ends up hurting you or others, you can only blame yourself.
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hoby's post could be used as an example, he/she uses a quote from Spiderman in their argument instead of what philosophers have discussed and proposed over hundreds of years regarding the relationship of power and responsibility.
It simplifies a very complicated subject. I don't necessarily think it's harmful or that helpful, just over simplified and possibly misleading. Much like Wikipedia and various other sources of information on the internet. Of course you could use the internet to research philosophical discussions and history regarding distributive responsibility as well.
Developing reasoning skills and basically finding out why things are the way they are or how people come to their conclusions is often more important than just finding an answer to a question using a search engine on the internet if you are trying to become more intelligent or knowledgeable about any given subject.
Like SC2 for example, most people can blindly follow a build order and that can be helpful, however if you don't understand why you're building stuff at specific times then you are limiting your knowledge and won't improve much more or at least past a certain level of skill so it could be seen as harmful to your progression as a SC2 player. The more freely available the build orders are on the internet the more blind followers of them there will be and there may be less experimentation and innovation.
Maybe some people could also argue that technology could breed a new generation of Luddites who would become unwilling to try anything "new" because they believe the internet is all knowing and so become as adversed to any different method of learning eg going back to learning from books. It's a misconception that Luddites were adverse to new technology, they were adverse to a method of manufacturing that changed they way they had previously worked. If a new generation only learns by using the internet then that generation could also be highly adverse to reading books and doing proper research when the answers to questions that are posed are so easily found.
Of course a huge amount of research is also much more readily available on the internet and is also much easier to access than searching a library but we rarely opt for an alternative path to quick and easy.
tl:dr - both
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It helps us.
People bring forth strange arguments, throwbacks to "ye olden times" and claims that lack any scientific basis.
The truth is that it helps us. It's net positive is so unbalanced towards the positive, it's ridiculous.
To suggest that the internet harms us is on the same level as suggesting that electricity harms us.
Then you get some people that say "Well, electricity is good, but it's also bad."
It's good because it powers our entire society and raises us above the stone age. It's bad because it can electrify you. Such dishonesty. The scales are not balanced. Electricity has a billion good things and a handful of negatives that are a stretch at best.
The internet has closed the distances of our globe. The internet has made businesses operate a hundred times more effective. The internet has created a free flow of information that nobody could have predicted.
The downsides are hardly worth noting or even entirely imaginary.
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On January 30 2012 23:40 Barrin wrote:
As a whole, difficult to say.
It is surely both helping us and harming us.
Do not underestimate social networking (in all forms). Actually I'm not going to explain this because it's fairly common knowledge, either you get it or you don't.
You don't clearly state whether you think that social networking (in all forms) is good or bad. You simply state that it's fairly common knowledge...
It's hardly decided whether it's good or bad. Old people complain how it destroys connections. Young people simply point out that these dinosaurs couldn't even make a facebook account, let alone make an educated statement on it's influence on social relations.
It gives us easy access to tons of information. Do you have any idea what it took to find half the things we search for (that also existed) 500 years ago? Knowledge is power. More easily-accessed knowledge = more powerful.
So that's a plus.
At the same time we are also RELYING on the internet for these things. So if there is a time when we don't have the internet and have to rely on ourselves, we have less true experience to draw from.
This argument doesn't make sense.
Before the internet, all knowledge was printed. We still draw most of our info from books. Do we lose this knowledge without a book?
When we are standing around without wifi, we can't wiki who the president of China is. Does that mean that before the internet existed we all had books in our pockets that told us who the president of China was? Ofcourse not. Depending on the time we might have to wait till the library opened. Now it's a matter of finding an internet connection.
We sacrifice lesser permanent skill/knowledge to gain far more potentially temporary skill/knowledge.
People still follow an education.
A rocket scientist today knows more about rockets then a rocket scientist in 1950. So he has more "permanent" knowledge then pre-internet.
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The question isn't really is it helping or harming us. It's easy to point out that it does both. The question is would we have been better off without it? It's too broad a question to tackle in a blurb, I'm afriad. Knowledge is power, but with power comes great responsibility and with anonymity comes a complete lack of accountability. It's a combination of cliches but I believe it serves to demonstrate the overarching issues with the internet.
If you ask me for my first impression to the question, I'd say I wouldn't take the internet out of history, but I might have done it differently.
edit: zalz please stop posting, you are horrible and tedious. His arguments make perfect sense. If you are wired to the internet you begin to depend on it to always be there so you don't have to memorise anything. It is because of this accessibility that we don't memorise things. When we depended on books, it was often worth it to memorise information because we can't carry around 100s of books with us everywhere we go. Whether this is significant or not is still to be debated, but you are making a moronic comparison. Yes, we can still memorise things, but the point is we have less motivation to do so.
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Any disadvantages of the internet are clearly outweighed by the advantages, being able to talk to someone on the other side of the world in real time, access to nearly all information in human history are the big advantages.
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On January 31 2012 03:18 Chef wrote:
The question isn't really is it helping or harming us. It's easy to point out that it does both.
Again, so does electricity. Saying that something is both good and bad doesn't mean anything. You put the good and the bad on the scale and then you watch and see which side the scale goes. For both the internet and electricity, the advantages outweigh the bad to such an extreme degree that saying "both" becomes dishonest.
The question is would we have been better off without it? It's too broad a question to tackle in a blurb, I'm afriad.
I'll answer it for you. Yes.
Knowledge is power, but with power comes great responsibility
Quoting Spiderman. Ok.
and with anonymity comes a complete lack of accountability. It's a combination of cliches but I believe it serves to demonstrate the overarching issues with the internet.
There is nothing that you need to be held accountable for on the internet. Crimes like child pornography or other forms of cyber crime are already being fought.
Anonymity is already dead for the criminal. For the rest, anonymity is great. It's a great stride forward for privacy. The ability to learn and speak your opinion without revealing yourself. It should be a human right.
If you ask me for my first impression to the question, I'd say I wouldn't take the internet out of history, but I might have done it differently.
Sounds awefully Orwellian.
edit: zalz please stop posting, you are horrible and tedious. His arguments make perfect sense. If you are wired to the internet you begin to depend on it to always be there so you don't have to memorise anything. It is because of this accessibility that we don't memorise things. When we depended on books, it was often worth it to memorise information because we can't carry around 100s of books with us everywhere we go. Whether this is significant or not is still to be debated, but you are making a moronic comparison. Yes, we can still memorise things, but the point is we have less motivation to do so.
And yet there is no noticeable decrease in inteligence in the population.
The memory has never been subject to motivation. The inability to remember the contents of a text has nothing to do with motivation.
It's part intelligence and part training.
Even if it was motivation, then people would still remember the content of texts because from childhood they are forced to learn and remember information or they will fail at school.
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I read the first article, I didn't feel like reading the second but I skimmed it. I actually wanted to notice whether I found it difficult to read long articles; and I think I have developed a tendency, like the author, to avoid reading long articles unless necessary (which is why I skipped the second).
But I think the first article brings forward a really important point; that technology can influence us in ways that we may not realize, like with Nietzsche realizing that using a typewriter affected how he wrote about things. When we have so much available to us at instant recall, and information is increasingly summarized, I think it may have negative effects on the thinking process, with our capability to grasp difficult, complex subjects becoming harder to achieve due to the fact that typically one needs to be able to read dense, long texts in order to fully understand the issues. Unless of course such subjects can be summarized into key points, and we get really good at teaching things; but somehow I doubt this is possible for all subjects.
On the question of whether it helps us or hinders us, I think its largely the wrong question and misses the point. Its just like you said; the internet is like a tool - its positive or negative use depends largely on the user. The problem here is a lack of awareness as to how specific types of internet use (browsing through abstracts, using twitter compulsively, etc.) can effect one's mentality. So ultimately its not the Internet's fault; its the users fault (assuming they are aware of whats happening) for not taking the time to read longer articles, then pausing to think and draw their own conclusion, as opposed to lazily reading abstracts and summaries as a replacement for exercising their own thinking process by verifying the information and understanding how the conclusion was reached.
But at the same time I doubt things will become so bad that we will become robots like the author worries about so dramatically. At some point people will realize; I haven't thought deeply about this important issue, thats really important to me. I should take the time to read some books on the subject. People aren't automatons that blindly follow the easy, lazy path because obstacles are placed in front of them all the time that forces them to think and read. Especially when people can interact with each other more than ever over internet forums like this one! Its very stimulating.
It might be good also to target what you mean when you say the internet is harming/helping us (i.e. what the articles talk about - does the internet positively or negatively impact our ability to think). Because looking at the broader picture, the question is practically a truism for the side of helping us. I mean people aren't brain dead robots; and if thats the only significant downside, there are probably 100 upsides to counter that.
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Since technology has improved the overall quality of life for most people, I'd always fall on the side that it helps. Technology has never really 'hurt' humans. Humans have always built tools and technology that helps them perform tasks more efficiently. Performing tasks more efficiently in turn has helped society to advance to a higher quality of living standard.
Every technology has its side effects. Let's example a very broad technology category: vehicular transport.
On one hand, the invention of vehicles has allowed humans to travel very far, allowing more people to interact with each other and allowing people to live far from where they work. Cities are in part possible because of vehicle technology allowing people to live far from where they work, and allowing perishable goods like food be shipped in from far, far away.
On the other hand, due to our vehicle technology, we are not as physically fit because we aren't running to our workplaces and because we don't have to carry foodstuffs back home from the local farm or else growing the food ourselves in back-breaking labor. The physical degradation is relatively small and low priority problem compared to the benefits that society has received as a whole.
Even if suddenly we would be better off for being more physically fit now, say all our cars broke down tomorrow (or if we say, ran out of gas), we'd may be worse off for it in the short term, but we'd undoubtedly adapt to that fact rather quickly.
In that same vein, the internet is changing how think, how we perceive things. If there are negative effects (which may just be minor, the equivalent to the physical atrophy mentioned above), it is a small price to pay for the benefits received in return.
Many things have changed, but humans continue to be driven by the same needs, desires, wants and passions that they've always been. In the event that we lose the tools that help us in our everyday lives I'm confident we'll be able to go back to where we were without it. There is no real great loss, humanity will re-adjust. Some (or many) may die during the re-adjustment if it's serious enough, but we wouldn't have been able to sustain so many of us if these technologies didn't exist anyway.
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The Internet allows information to proliferate at 1/3 the speed of light (I think that's the approx. speed of an electric current). Since information can spread so quickly, the thinking power of the human race as a whole is greatly improved. Sure, it creates a bunch of basement-dwelling Betas addicted to the Internet, and God-awful Youtubers (who sometimes do create entertaining or interesting content... in a sea of crap), but overall it still improves humanity. Were it not for the Internet I'd know far less about history or certain aspects of culture or some biology, because I look that shit up when I'm bored.
I mean... I knew Kim Jong Il died 9 minutes after it happened and I'm on the other side of the world, and that was from cruising in the asshole of the Internet itself... I wasn't even looking for that information and I learned it anyways.
Good night, sweet prince.
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Memorization of facts has almost nothing to do with intelligence.
I hate this question, and it is always a prompt for writing comp at high school and college levels, and the start of debate in a lot of classes. It's so incredibly foolish to say that, on the whole, the internet is harming us because not one con outweighs the immense good that comes with having access to tons and tons of information that for centuries was inaccessible or extremely hard to come by for many.
Absolutely nothing trumps that. You can instantly access literary classics, ground breaking studies and a whole wealth of information that just two decades ago, you had to hope that your local library had on file. Didn't live near one? Too bad. In a poor community with shitty library funding? Tough luck. The internet, specifically in the last few years with a lot of excellent, time-tested resources going on the web, has majorly helped even the playing field, so to speak. Now the kid from a family who couldn't afford expansive encyclopedias and book collections can find a lot of that information online for free. The filters that existed years ago which controlled information—publishing houses, news agencies, etc—have had their power chipped away.
The flip side is that the less filters on that information is both good and bad. While it is now harder to stifle opposing view points, it's also much easier for crappy misinformation to be perpetuated if the group or individual is web savvy and determined enough.
That is at the crux of the argument. The other stuff—social media killing relationships, instant web access killing the need for memorization of trivial shit, etc—is really just old stuffy people arguments that are such minor blips on the radar compared to the overall good that the internet brings.
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EPT
