Is the Internet Good for Us?

We've been reading a lot of articles about how the Internet is a bad thing for various reasons. There's the argument that it cuts off human interactions, that our attention spans are shortening because we move from page to page, article to article with such speed that when put into a regular classroom that doesn't have that speed kids get bored.

I personally think that the Internet doesn't cut off communication between humans to an extent that should be worried about. Various programs (AIM, Skype, and now Google Hangouts) allow for much more communication. I personally don't like talking on the phone all that much, but my friends and I will use Google Hangout in order to video chat with a group of 5 or more people all at once. It's nice to have that function because my friends and I all live in different states, and if we didn't have the internet we wouldn't talk as much.

The attention span thing is a bit worrying. I personally find myself getting bored with things after a certain amount of time. It used to be that I was able to read for an hour/hour and a half straight, but now I get distracted and look things up on my phone or my computer very easily. I agree that attention spans aren't what they used to be, but is that really a problem? In schools I think that teachers should create lessons that get kids up and moving around, and have different parts to them so that the kids can finish one part and then be pulled into the next because it changes the way it's done, the topic, or both. If a kid is sitting there listening to a 50 minute lecture on the Civil War of course they're going to get bored. Who wouldn't? If you make the lecture interactive, asking questions, stopping to answer questions, giving kids something to actually do other than listen it will greatly improve the lesson and their ability to pay attention. Of course, there's the study from one of the articles that shows that even when kids are distracted with toys they still retained the same amount of relevant information that the kids who were paying attention retained.

I personally think that the internet is a good thing. It opens doors of communication and connection, keeps you in touch with people that might have otherwise left your life, and allows research to be done faster. I think that students need to know how to actually go to a library and figure out how to look up books, but since the internet was invented we have access to many more articles and sources that would have otherwise been overlooked.