Does the Internet Make You Smarter

The title of this article is Does the Internet Make You Smarter? It is written by Clay Shirky. The article is written in the Wall Street Journal. This journal entry is written to people who are used to the old routines of past and think that the internet is going to make the new generation stupid. This is also written to the new generation that is supposedly going to be so stupid, as a challenge to doing something great with the opportunity we have been given with this newfound technology. This journal points to the fact that history repeats itself with every new technology and every new invention. People think that it is going to corrupt our society. Then it ends up being something great, something that we really needed and something that helped us become more intellectual. Why is this the case? Why does it take our society so long to accept new ways of doing thing? Why do we have to jump to the conclusion that we are going to misuse it and nothing good will come from it?
Clay Shirky starts his journal by stating the beliefs of people today. He says, “The bulk of publicly available media is now created by people who understand little of the professional standards and practices for media (Shirky).” He says this makes people worry about the future and that this will “lead to increasingly alarmed predictions of incipient chaos and intellectual collapse (Shirky).” He says that the older generation believes this to be true because people are not adhering to the traditional ways that media has been produced. This automatically means that there is no quality to their work and it is not as good as it used to be. Shirky says this is the way society has always dealt with new media and he gives examples to prove it.
One example is with the invention of the Gutenberg press. He said this allowed the Bible to be translated into many languages, but it was also met with, “a flood of contemporary literature, most of it mediocre (Shirky).” He followed this statement with, “Vulgar