Socio-cultural Issues

Socio-cultural Issues

Perhaps the most enriching and obvious societal change influenced by the web is education. The Internet is a library of infinite knowledge, and like all knowledge, some can help us and some can hurt us. Although there are numerous beneficial effects that the web has on education, I will address three: research, interactivity, and advancement.

Research

Having a virtual library with the ease and convenience of the Internet, students can be more efficient, resourceful, and creative in their schoolwork and research. Schoolwork can be submitted legibly by electronic mail, saving paper, time, and difficulty. The mere understandable, clear, and consistent typography of electronic media is a benefit in itself. Marshall McLuhan, author of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, explains that typographic extensions brought man universal literacy and education (McLuhan 235). Furthermore, primary and secondary research can be conducted through the web. A student can interview a foreigner or visit the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the White House Archives, and libraries from all over the world, traveling to places their circumstances might prevent. I know personally that when I was in high school, research on the Internet was almost mandatory. Most schools were taking a proactive approach to the integration of technology in the education system. Teachers would research and find articles from the Internet to incorporate into the lesson for the day. I must point out that although I attended high school in the late 90s, the school I attended was very small (population about 500), rural, and by no means wealthy.

The primary negative consequence of research on the Internet is plagiarism. There are websites that sell or give research papers away on the web, allowing students to pass the work off as their own. It is also possible that a student may steal information and claim it as original, which is another form of plagiarism. This is a violation of both legal and ethical affairs. Other consequences involve the knowledge of sufficiently retrieving knowledge through search engines, the credibility of the sources used for research, and equal access to students around the nation and world.

Interactivity

Another major benefit from the web is interactivity through hypermedia. The web provides “forms of interactivity impossible with video and film” (Farkas 116). In Principles of Web Design, David and Jean Farkas explain that:

Websites can adaptively employ numerous instructional strategies, for example, pacing instruction in response to the student’s performance on quizzes, and can support virtual learning communities through message boards, real-time chat, and even video-conferencing.