Convenience As We Thought

I wake up every morning and the first thing I do, like many others, isto reach for my iPhone or Macbook. With no exceptional thought behind it, I'm simply curious as to whether I'd received an email from my family in Brazil and America, or maybe a comment on Facebook from a friend in Japan. The convenience made possible by the internet has truly become a habitual activity, so unappreciated by us who grew up with it, and so easily accessible that we don't realize how much we depend on the internet in this modern era. We don't know what it feels like to write a letter and have to wait days, weeks, maybe even months, for a reply. Only on those rare occasions where we can't access the internet for a day, or maybe a week, do we truly remember its worth. After reading The History of the Internet in a Nutshell by Cameron Chapman, I realize how it became more and more convenient with each historical breakthrough.

In 1969, Stanford and UCLA connected their computers to relay simple messages using the ARPANET network. It marks the beginning of the internet, thought I wonder if they imagined it would be accessed worldwide within a few decades. It has allowed access an unlimited amount of information to someone who might otherwise not have have had the opportunity. I was dumbfounded, yet not surprised, when my one of my business teachers said that because of the internet, we read 4 times the amount of words we used to read a few decades ago,  but we also retain much less than we used to. Perhaps we find memorize less because we thing we can easily access it again later, or it's because we read more useless information instead of academic works. Either way, I realized the internet is truly great, but also something we need to use use more wisely.