Where the modern technology taking us?

An experiment about the use of internet has been made recently by a French teacher.

A high school professor gave his students an essay to do at home. While he was grading the papers, he noticed that a lot of the essays had similar sentences and expressions. After some research on Google he found a similar essay that students could purchase for 1.95€.  After seeing this, he had the idea of making a pretty funny experiment.

The experiment:

Two months before the beginning of the next school year he started to spread on the web wrong information about a baroque poem from Charles de Vion d’Alibray, written in the 17th century.

• He created an account on Wikipedia and on the page of the biography of Charles de Vion d’Alibray, he added that the poet was in love with Miss de Beaunais (this person never existed).

• He posed as a highschool student and posted questions about this poem on different forums. He then created other different usernames and posted answers to those questions. These answers seemed to be savant but were totally far-fetched.

• He posted an essay about this poem on websites such as “oodoc.com” or “oboulo.com”. These websites failed to check the quality of the essay or if it was protected by author’s rights, and published it. The introduction was free and to see the whole essay you had to pay few euros.

• He posted links on the web to these pages (Wikipedia, forums, odoc and oboulo.com) to improve the ranking on Google.

After two month of posting false information on the web, the beginning of the school year finally came.

He gave his students an essay about this much talked-about poem. They had two weeks to do it at home. The instructions were very clear; it was a personal work, there was no need to do research on the internet, and it was an exercise of personal reflection.

The results:

Unfortunately of the 65 students, 51 of them had copied what they found on the internet without thinking of the validity and legitimacy of what they got on the web.

Some sentences and some paragraphs were copied verbatim, showing a total incomprehension of the poem and of the methodology of the exercise.

The moral of the story:

This story is very telltale of the inconvenience of modern technology. Through this experiment, this teacher wanted to reveal the “dangers” of the internet.

First, it reveals that a lot of content found on the internet is not valid. Nowadays, thanks to the new media, communication has become easier and knowledge is much more accessible and easy to find. However, it is still important to be careful in our research and to continue to think for ourselves.

Indeed it proves that people are thinking on their own less and less. Too often the first reflex is to go on Google before simply thinking!

Unfortunately the modern technology has also brought laziness. By always taking ideas of others instead of thinking for ourselves, our personal culture and own thinking will disappear.

That’s why it is important to use the internet with great caution and be aware of its limits.