Information In The Nineteenth Century

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Recommended: Elocution on excessive use of internet

In an information-saturated world, an individual can access a vast amount of information with relative ease. However, with this abundance of knowledge also comes information overload, ultimately affecting how individuals read and retain information. What technology gives us usually comes with us losing something as well. Due to an extensive amount of information, different reading materials, and shorter attention spans, the Internet does not entirely enhance one’s reading and knowledge intake, but limits it.
Knowledge is a sacred possession that many people desire. The issue of importance in the nineteenth century was how to make the information in the world accessible to all. To solve this issue, according to Neil Postman, "Americans of …show more content…

Nicholas Carr states in his novel The Shallows, that individuals have abandoned the "linear, hierarchical world of the book" and have entered the "Web's world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity", where an individual's greatest skill is "discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux" (111). Readers are no longer required to have multiple books at once to cross reference information. Cross referencing is easily available by means of hypertext. The Web, according to Jay Bolter, enables readers to jump from page to page by means of links; a process that continues indefinitely (27). Readers are not stuck on a particular page, but can go back and forth with ease by means of hypertext. Rather than the linear hierarchical order of the book, a reader on the Internet can follow an indefinite “path through virtual space” to explore related topics of the original text (28). Consequently, this freedom can be problematic. There have been multiple instances where I have been in the middle of attempting to read a dense article online, only to click on a hyperlink that shifts my attention elsewhere. Although it is beneficial to get background knowledge of the text that I was originally reading, I very rarely go back to the original source of information. After the first shift of focus, the pattern continues, as I gradually make my …show more content…

According to Geert Lovink in his novel Networks Without a Cause, “data flows [have piled] up until the system breaks down”, enabling readers to deal with an excessive amounts of information, resulting in a breakdown when information is unavailable (24). Because information on the Web is so readily available, we expect to find answers, and we expect to find those answers in a timely manner. With the advent of technological devices that are meant to increase knowledge, individuals become too dependent on them, allowing memory capacity become dependent on “architectures of information systems” (25). People’s ability to memorize and retain information and weakened as individual’s rely more and more on the Internet to provide information. Lovink states, “we no longer blame ourselves for forgetting names of friends or family but instead are upset if we fail to find the right file folder or enter incomplete query terms” (25). The Internet and other technological reading devices have become too much of an extension of our mind, that we are unable to use our mind in its original capacity. Information overload has made us think and act like a machine, thus diminishing our ability to deep read and retain information as humans have previously done. Consequently, the Internet does not enhance our

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