Computers and Technology

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Computers and Technology

One of the most pivotal technological moments that I can remember from my academic career is the first research project that I had to do early in high school when the internet was considered a valid resource. My school had just established an internet connection, and instead of going to the card catalog in the library, there was a rush for the computers. Encyclopedias and periodical guides had been usurped by this relatively new network of information, and it has changed the way that students do research. Why settle for a couple of magazine articles and a book in a library with limited resources when the World Wide Web offers an almost limitless supply of information on almost every topic known to man? Human beings have been able to perform extensive research on a subject ever since the printed word came into the daily life of scholars, but the advent of the cyberculture era has given us a completely new tool that has both its advantages and disadvantages in the pursuit of knowledge. The one thing that can be said for sure though is that research, whether sparked by casual curiosity or a deadline for a thesis, will never be the same.

Until the last decade or so, the bastion of knowledge and information was that building full of books that was known as the library. Print, in the form of books, magazines, newspapers, journals, encyclopedias, atlases, etc., was the primary source for information on virtually any subject. Even dialogue about information was exchanged with printed words on paper or handwritten letters. Then, something strange happened, and all of a sudden, you cannot find a library in a school anymore, there is only the media center. The media center is still a place to gather information, but now computers seem to overshadow the bookshelves. A small school with only a few hundred books is very limited in what topics it can cover, but place one computer in there with an internet connection and it opens a flood of information on everything from socialist realism to belly button lint. As Steven Johnson points out in his article “Links,” the very nature of the web, with its links that carry the user from one source of information to the other, provides something that seekers of information have never seen before.

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