The Internet’s Devastating Impact on Critical Thinking
During the Vietnam War, in the US there was a sort of “renaissance” of critical thinking, as its people were fed up with all the wars, which was the main cause of the anti-war movement that followed.
Because of the war, people were encouraged to question authority and to take whatever was sold to them by the media with a grain of salt.
After the war ended, though, and people were given more rights in order to make them comfortable enough not to question the government’s choices, this era of critical thinking in the US slowly diminished, because “why question something if you can live a great life”.
Slowly but surely, US citizens were stripped away their rights little by little, not too much to make a difference right away and face backlash but enough to make a difference in the long term.
This is one of the many examples of how an outburst of critical thinking can have a devastating impact
Over the last 30 years, the Internet has evolved to the point where you can access whatever information you want at any time while allowing a devastating threat to take place, which I like to call the critical thinking silencer.
The critical thinking Silencer
If You have all of this information on the tip of your fingers, why bother trying things yourself when there are millions of people out there who have been in the exact same situation as you and know the answer?
This leads to a lack of one’s critical thinking ability because answers can be found with zero effort, so people don’t think for themselves anymore, which leads to another problem.
For instance, a child born before the 1960s had to learn to do long multiplication in their head, as pocket calculators weren’t made mainstream yet, unless they wanted to be frowned upon by their classmates.
After the calculator went mainstream, though, there was suddenly no need to be able to do long multiplication in your head so younger generations never learned to do that.
This phenomenon has become even more apparent after the rise of artificial intelligence, mainly ChatGPT and DALL-E, which can write essays and provide you with any information you want all of the time,
Without critical thinking, we are left defenseless and impressionable in a world where big companies such as Alphabet and Apple basically control what we can and can’t see.
But there is still hope for younger generations to be able to form an opinion of their own utilising critical thinking with the recourses I mentioned above.
First, we need to understand the fact that not everything you see is true. You should always investigate things further and question things while trying to form your own opinion on the matter.
Secondly, you need to use your tools effectively and not just blindly surf through the internet and believe anything you see.
Lastly, try and see things from other points of view. For instance, for a long time, I thought that making money involved working hard, but after deep diving into the concept of capitalism and its various quirks, I realised that there are several ways to generate income, even when not actively engaging in any sort of activity.
