August 2008 Archives

Ten years ago, only small groups of people read or wrote on the internet. In China, the traditional news media said the internet is a drug for teenagers; the educators said the internet would destroy the future of new generations. Then, how about the situation today? The highest administrator of China, Chairman Hu, said the internet would benefit the whole country; the most popular network writer Han said blogs will replace newspapers in the next twenty years.

Any new form in people's life would be difficult to accept at first. We usually call this 'evolution'. Yes, internet is an evolution of human beings in the twentieth century, and it has been widely accepted in the twenty first century. But while we accept it, love it, and count on it, we should also realize it has its own weaknesses.

There are reasons that educators have said the internet would destroy the future of new generations. Actually, as internet is a highly free form of speech, most people cannot identify the truth from tons of rubbish information. How many of us check more than 10 meaningless advertising WebPages every week? How many of us received more than 10 annoying spam emails every day? At least I do. In the meanwhile, not only does this impractical information disturb our limited concentration, the news from the internet is unreality. For example, in the Chinese network, most Chinese articles indicate people in Tibet who want to gain independence and try to kill the Hans in their land. On the contrary, most English articles on the Internet, which have mostly been banned by the Chinese network police, are telling us the other version of the story.

Moreover, as the over-abundance of information from the internet, the readers are losing interest and patience to read long article. That means, some very good articles contain too much detail, thereby they have been ignored. On the other hand, readers would possibly miss a lot of detail about the knowledge they ought to gain from traditional media.

In a nutshell, the internet is still evolving. And because of that, we should do more to identify the truly useful information and try to achieve more specific knowledge from a main topic.

(Edited by Nicole Edwards)