Unit One Essay

Breaking Up With the Online Reading and Writing

        Last summer, my best friend and I both applied to an internship at a local newspapers company in our city. It is a work to write opinions on their website about recent news. Working for the newspapers is one of my dreams and I was so excited about that job. However, when we came to the newspapers office, the manager decided to choose my friend as an online writer because she could type 150 words per minute, but my typing is just 70 words. I could not understand that they only focus on the typing speed but the manage told me that “fast typing can help the newspaper always have the first voice than other newspapers, and as for giving opinions, a lot of writers can give great opinions not just you could. As for this job, writers need to be efficient”. At that summer, I was so dispirited because I am always confident about my writing, but the efficiency nearly destroys my dreams about working for the newspapers. Does the Internet really change writers and readers mind?

        Actually, I am a big fan of handwriting and print-books.  I really enjoy using handwriting when I was taking a writing test, but sometimes I need to take times to translate all handwriting works become the Word documents because a lot of test cannot accept paper work. Some teachers suggested me that type is convenient, and it is popular not only because people can read your articles earlier, but also it can spread your article to let more people to read your works on the Internet. Not only my teachers, a lot of people believe that online writing making our lives easier.  People use Facebook to communicate with others, use Twitters to show opinions, and bloggers to write articles or personal experiences. Tons of people enjoy writing or reading under the flashy screen. However, even there are also tons of readings and writings on the websites, but most of them are not really useful or enough academic, and the online reading always includes a lot of advertisements. In my opinion, I think online reading and writing is not useful than we expected and it trains us to become a lazy reader or writer because: there are many false sources exist, goal-oriented writing or advertisements in the writing and online reading habits make people lose their concentrations.

       Firstly, a lot of online sources are not academic and even untrue. It misleads readers’ minds and provides wrong information for readers, especially for the students. Internet includes huge sources, and everyone can type things to show their opinions. Those opinions are not helpful for the study because they are subjective. If you want to find the definition for “business operations”, you can find a lot of information, and plenty of websites can give you the definition of the term of “ business operations”, such as the Business dictionary, Wikipedia and some definitions was given by the unknown author.  In fact, all the definitions are different so that how can we know which one is reliable for the study and which one is just helps you get the main ideas. We cannot decide about that. Actually, we always get the academic information from a print book, not the Internet.  It is no doubt there are also a lot of online resources are academic and they are from the online library or other academic organizations. I just want to point that use the reliable sources for study and do not just rely on the Google search for your study. We could use the search to help us to know the terms better or get the basic understanding, but we have to recognize which sources is useful for the study.  For example, a lot of professor would like to show information or basic knowledge from the Wikipedia on the class, but they really against students use Wikipedia to copy the same definition or research for the study because it is unreliable. The reason of it is anyone can revise any parts of terms on the Wikipedia so that we cannot only believe the information on it.

        Secondly, Internet makes us become a lazy readers or writers, and make people lose concentrations because of they spend too much times on the online readings or writing. In the article of “Is Google Make Us Stupid”, Nicholas Carr mentions that people read no more than one or two pages of an article or book, and even if they save a long article, they never went back to read it (par.7). When people spend long times on the online readings, they prefer to find the main ideas and skip some parts of the article. People just focus on the thesis statements, first sentences and last sentences. After a long time, people lose the ability to read a long article, and also they cannot focus on things for a long times. Carr states that “ the more they use the web, the more they have to fight to stay focus on long piece of writing (Carr 2). ”Losing concentrations is also because of multi-tasking; a lot of people do homework, check Facebook, and shop online stores and text at the same times. Their brains separate into different parts to take short tasks so that they cannot develop their concentrations. This is also show of some online writers. A lot of bloggers prefer to share things with their readers, but when we read the blogs, we can find that many writers prefer post more pictures and less words in the blog.  This phenomenon makes people become more visual, and people receive knowledge or memory things more rely on the images, not the words. If they seat and read a print book for a long time, they will feel frustrated and will not willing to pay too much attentions on the books. Additionally, if we always read articles at the short time, we cannot actually have the critical thinking of it. In the article of “Is Google make us Stupid”, the author emphasize that the immediacy and efficiency may weaker our capacity of deep reading (Carr 3). We really need to develop our critical thinking, to read writing deeper so that we can make the knowledge more strong in our brain.

        Thirdly, there are a lot of advertisements to distract readers’ attentions, and a lot of articles are goal-oriented because some writers just want to achieve their goals through the Internet. People can do anything on the Internet, and they sell things, spread gossips, make profits, express political opinions and even make lies to achieve their goal through the typing. In the article of “The Perils of Setting Goals”, published on New York Times newspapers, the expert mentions that do not overdo the goals-orientated, a lot of people want to make profits through the Internet and they do not care other things.  I had ever met a deceptive trade on web. I search for “Harry Potter ” in the Google, when I read a short introduction in that page, there was a flashy advertisements and showed nice price to attract me, when I entered this website is really wonderful. They make everything clear and beautiful to show all works about “Harry Potter”, including pictures, short videos, magic cards and also cut some short reading of the book. They provide a great discount of the whole set of the books: the whole set of books just needs 20 dollars, and the price was so great so that I paid for it. However, they never ship the books and I even did not know if they have “Harry Potter” books. Through the reading, the advertisements attract me, and the fake online store also lied to me, and I even forgot my original purpose is just read the introductions. Additionally, there are a lot of people show political bias, sell goods and even sometime show bad things. We cannot really get the great and correct information from the websites.

        In conclusion, I think through the online sources, both of readers and writers become more lazy than before, and the online sources only can provide limited information for us because there are tons of false sources exist, goal-oriented writing or advertisements in the writing and online reading habits making people to lose their concentrations. Although I think there are some negative aspects that Internet provides of reading and writing, there are still a lot of academic, useful and really great sources for us to use. I think people should have their own judgments to choose the reliable sources on the Internet, to find the most useful information from the online library or other academic organizations, not just search or only read the online sources. Also, choosing some bloggers who use words a lot more than pictures, share opinions with them. I hope people take more time to read print books to find more useful information rather than waste time to read unreliable sources.