In the past, most forms of entertainment and information have
been found through television or in physical media such as novels and periodicals.
Today, however, there has been a strong shift to all of this information being
found on the World Wide Web. I believe that this shift in consuming media over the
internet has had both a positive and negative impact on my life as a student.
On the positive end, it has become very easy to acquire
information for school papers and research projects. It is also very simple to
find information on things that I want to learn how to do using the internet.
For example, there was a time where I discovered an article online on how to
write a video game using computer programming, and since then I have decided to
become a computer scientist and program video games as a career. The access to
media online has also made it easy to find information on things that are not
working properly and how to fix them. Because almost any type of information,
if not all of it, can be found on the internet, anything someone can be looking
for is usually just a quick search in a search engine and it is found with
ease.
However, there are negatives to everything being available
on the internet. Because I do most of my work on my laptop, I have a tendency
to surf the web and watch videos rather than actually do my work. When it comes
to other pass times such as watching television or reading a book, it can be a
lot easier to simply walk away from them because they are only a source of
entertainment, where as a computer is both a tool for completing work and tasks
as well as finding entertainment. A lot of the time when I am working on
homework, I find it very easy to just simply switch windows to Facebook or
YouTube and just start wasting time I could be spending working on the task at
hand. Since a computer is much more versatile than other tools, especially with
the internet, it is very easy to find ways that distract rather than complete
tasks.
