Dewey Replaced

In present day, it is possible to sit in your living room when you are sick and type your symptoms into an online site such as WebMD and get suggestions on what your illness could be. Although these sites have no guaranteed answers, you can at least figure out if you actually need to visit a doctor or maybe it’s just the jackpot for all the hypochondriacs out there. But, before WebMD and even before the internet was popularized, acquiring information was a little different.

Taking a look back in history shows how getting the information you need took a lot of effort, not just a simple Google search. For example, say you were given an assignment that required you to conduct research on the original thirteen colonies and write a paper about it. (Let’s forget about the internet for a second. We’ll say that you’re in the early 1900’s and the internet was merely a rumor.) How would you go about finishing this assignment? Well, with the aid of the Dewey Decimal system you’d most likely be sitting in the library sifting through many history books to get your information. Back in those days, the library was the main source of mass information. 

Of course, nowadays conducting research on an assignment like that would take much less time and it will most likely have more detail because of the mass information available on the internet. In fact, the library has even been called obsolete. Although there are several uses for a library, the internet has taken over. An article in the Oxford Press “Will Internet make libraries obsolete?”,  discusses how the internet has become such a popular hub for mass information that no one goes to the libraries anymore. This seems to be a growing trend when it comes to students and libraries. But another aspect of the article discussed how many students are in favor of having a library even though they don’t use it. So maybe we aren’t able to let go just yet.

We can see that as the internet has begun to rise, so does our need for knowledge. The research assignment discussed earlier is just a fundamental example of how gaining access to information has changed over the years. Presently, our need for information grows because of its ease of access. With laptops, iPads, smart-phones, and tablets, getting the most recent sports scores or headline news is just a few clicks or taps away. In a piece published on CMSwire, “The Need to Know Relevant Information Now”, Heather Fassio talks about how we have this need to look up random facts just because we can. She emphasizes that it’s no longer information we need but topics would like to know about. So most likely, that report on the original thirteen colonies would be put on the back burner while things like current events, celebrity news, and sports updates are looked up.

Our society’s need for information can also be something of a concern. It’s not that we’re learning too much it’s that we’re not learning enough. We glance over a lot of information like Yahoo’s news article headlines and the local current events but we don’t take a closer look. One article, called “Is the Internet Making us Stupid?” discusses the lack of depth in the information we seek. The researchers mentioned in the article talk about how jumping from one link to the next causes our thoughts to be broken up. The article says that this means that we are going through a lot of information but sacrificing the depth. In the past, going to the library meant finding useful information. Now, we tend to skip over evaluation of what we’re reading because we’re too curious to see what’s next. But this does not mean the abundance of information online is a negative thing, it just means the way we process the information is changing. I believe society should keep an eye on this trend even though we’ve come a long way from using just using a catalog to find information.