Blog 2: The Internet

In the beginning of high school, I was lucky enough to have gotten my first cell phone and was excited to chat on Instant Messenger over my dial up connection internet. The rapid improvements in the technological field make these day-to-day tasks more efficient, but have turned us into a lazier and more impatient society. Today, I would be hard-pressed to find someone who truly appreciated a cell phone with no color screen, no Internet access, and no built in camera. Dial up connection is unheard of as its speed is completely outdated. While improvements have given us the ability to watch movies over the Internet, listen to music, load several pages at one time, and share information more efficiently, they have trained to become more frustrated and impatient. Going out to the movie theater has become such a task now that we can sit at home, log onto a website, and watch anything at the click of a button. We are even too lazy to go to the movie store. While this benefits us because information and entertainment is cheaper and easier to access, it encourages illegal downloading that is arguably unethical. Technological developments have just created more grey area when it comes to ethics. The Internet alone has blurred the line of what is considered ethical. Eight years ago, I probably would have believed that taking music or movies, without paying, would be completely unethical. Now, I have no problem listening to free music or watching movies for free on the Internet. The question then is, have my ethics changed because of age and maturity, or has the Internet really had this large impact on my life? I believe that the Internet has desensitized me in some aspects and has therefore changed my ethics, for better or for worse. Wikipedia, the amazing site that it is, still has a negative and controversial side. While it has become a great forum to share information on just about any subject, the information is not always reliable. It is so easy to answer your questions and do quick research using sites such as Wikipedia, that the academic standard seems to be lowered. Because anyone can publish anything on the web, reliability becomes a huge problem. Unfortunately, we seem to be satisfied with questionable information, sacrificing academic integrity in favor of convenience.