Dumber?

I have heard it said, written, exclaimed that the Internet is making us dumber. I disagree. The Internet provides us access to answers. Before the net we had to access books. Who had books?


Yahoo, Alta Vista, Google, Wikipedia and all the digital primary sources accessible by so many. As we review the history of access to knowledge, those in power usually belittled the new form of presenting information to the people. They questioned its reliability, its credibility, its very existence. Certainly I am reminded of Franklin's advice: "Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see." Each seeker of truth needs to investigate for hirself. We have learned that prior knowledge may be incorrect since we were not in possession of all of the facts. We have seen how multiple camera angles at a sporting event assists us in seeing the right calls being made. We have learned by listening to various points of view on a subject we can understand something more deeply.

It has been said the knowledge is power. So it stands to reason that those in power are not apt to distribute that knowledge to those who might question authority and the possessors of power or who even want to wrest that power away. The use of the Internet is a power struggle and we see it in schools every day from the filters and who controls those filters to actual use of the computers in schools.

The growth of fact checkers on line has grown and now it is asked who is checking the fact checkers. During this presidential election, we are seeing sites like Snopes and FactChecker emerge as the great arbitrators of truths and lies. The next line of defense is now an industry checking on these sites for bias and accuracy.

I wonder how Franklin would react to the Internet.