Freedom of Thought

This society is pumping out more and more information to be consumed by the general population. Search engines make all answers a click away; even the deepest philosophical questions are addressed. Now, whenever any sort of information is needed, people can follow the discoveries of others to get their answers. This is a wonderful advancement for society, but it does have some minor side-effects. It’s amazing that there is so much access to the world around us. Societal bonds are broken down by the streams of internet processing, and people are more connected than ever before. It really is a virtual world within our own, destroying boundaries with the comfort of complete anonymity. However, this ease has the tendency to make people lazy or even lethargic in their thought processes. When all the answers are there waiting for you, why think about it for yourself? Instead of trying to explore and discover, Google it for fast and easy answers. What we have learned from Postmodernism, though, is that all retellings of a story are biased through the person telling it. So, when we rely on other’s accounts we are accepting their personal reality as a substitute for our own intuition. Our own thought process has been undermined by unconditionally accepting the biased truth of another. Perhaps Carr is right, “The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as ‘knowledge work’.” It may be streamlining the thought process, but it requires the internet surfer to abdicate any and all personal truths in favor of the truths accepted by strangers. In the future our thought process may be limited to only what we can find on Google.