information or misinformation over the web?
The widespread use of the internet has given people access to information on a level never experienced before. How does this increase in the availability of information influence life in today's world?" (Taken from the Official Guide to the TOEFL)
Invention of the internet, or more concretely, the World Wide Web, has affected human lives in tremendous ways. One of them is how easily can one access any kind of information nowadays. With that, however, come both positives and negatives, of which some of them I will address in the following paragraphs.
To begin with the upsides, thanks to the internet existing, people are able to follow, and be aware of vast amount of events and news all over the world on-demand. They don't have to buy tabloids every morning, or watch newsflashes at a given time on the television. Instead, they can simply open the website of their favorite news magazine anywhere and anytime, as long as they have an internet connection. Therefore, having this kind of opportunities certainly encourages political activism and involvement of citizens in the public matters which is almost undoubtedly a good thing. For instance, in Slovakia, recent murder of an investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée stirred up the biggest public protests since decades, with people demanding transparent and thorough investigation, government resignation and passing of strict anti-corruption and anti-mafia laws by the parliament.
In contrast, there are some downsides of widespread information availability as well. One of them, being unexpected growth of hoaxes and fake news spreading through the web. Large portions of internet users seem to fail to successfully distinguish actual facts and professional, sincere reporting from half-truths, propaganda or straight lies, which they encounter in the cyberspace. That may result into potentially harmful phenomena, such as current trend of parents refusing to vaccinate their children because of the belief that the vaccines do not work and cause autism, epilepsy and even death or recent rise in both on-line and off-line hatred towards individual ethnical groups as a whole based on exaggerating of isolated, anecdotal events and various conspiracy theories. Those can be nonetheless, at least partially dealt with by encouraging critical thinking and importance of facts and science in both child and adult population.
To sum up, extensive expansion of using internet services among population comes as a mixed bag. Still, I believe that positives outweigh the negatives and the adverse effects of misinformation spreading over the web can be tackled rather effectively by the promotion of critical thinking and fact-checking in the educational process.
