Internet's effect on education

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In 1962, Marshall McLuhan's highly popularized book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, outlined the effects of mass media (McLuhan, Galaxy 12). The collapse of space, time, and borders has contributed to our ever shrinking world, creating a 'global village'(McLuhan, Galaxy 24). McLuhan believed that this force would cause us to become more aware and educated, however the opposite has resulted (McLuhan, Galaxy 52). The internet has served to be highly detrimental to education. Its inherent propensity to degrade the quality of research, remove individual reasoning, and distract has lead me to believe that the internet is the worst thing to ever happen to education. One of the many underlying concerns with the internet is fundamental to its credibility. The internet in its entirety is available to anyone with a computer. Anyone can publish information or statistics with little or no validity. This very flaw in the system can result in one of two things: The researcher will either claim unfounded knowledge as fact, or be forced to sift through for the proverbial needle in haystack. The latter is a product of time, a luxury that students cannot afford. For this very reason, the internet is damaging to education. Several of Aldous Huxley's greatest fears, as illustrated in Brave New World, have come to fruition as we become more dependant on technologies such as the internet. The truth is drown in a sea of irrelevance (Huxley, 34). We are so saturated with information, that we are reduced to nothing (Huxley, 12). This holds more significance with the growing popularity of the internet than ever before. Information is severely diluted by an overflow of unreliable sources (Huxley, 53). Secondly, the internet was founded on the principle of bringing people together. The envisioned interdependence has been taken to an extreme where students are entirely contingent upon it. This can

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