Today while I was in my sociology class, in which we are learning about the technology revolution which lead into the tech age we are in now, I was thinking how that related to research. With all of the new ways to look things up and gather information so easily, I was wondering if it was for the better or worse in this new generation.
Yes, everything is so easy to find now, all you have to do is type a few words into a search engine and you’ll find millions of results in two seconds. Do people even realize how crazy that is? Could you imagine how long it would take someone to find millions of resources on just one topic? And now we can do it in two seconds??
But with that, is there a flaw in all this information at the click of a button. When people researched before the internet, they would actually have to search and look through many sources to find what they were looking for. And when doing that I have a feeling that people were able to either retain the information they were looking for better, because they worked so hard to find it, or either learned something new about another topic while they were researching.
Imagine all these book cases full of what feel like endless books, there is so much information to learn that if all we need to do now is type a couple of key words, we are missing out on so much. But that’s what this new technology era is doing to us, making everything easier.