In Cookson’s article “What Would Socrates Say,” he explains the fact that Google is taking away people’s feeling of ignorance. He quoted Socrates whom said, “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance” (par 1). Socrates is talking about the fact that you can never know too much there is an endless amount of stuff to learn about. But Cookson is scared that “Google has given us the world at our fingertips” and is soon to take away all known ignorance. Google has taken away the form in which we used to learn and we are now learning from compiled data and asking basic questions to get basic answers which we only tend to harness for so long. Socrates believed that we learned best by asking essential questions and testing tentative answers. “Otherwise, the great knowledge and communication tsunami of the 21st century may drown us in a sea of trivia instead of lifting us up on a rising tide of possibility and promise” (par 3). In essence Cookson is talking about us drowning in our own sea of questions on Google instead of striving to learn and advance our world we could be losing all hopes of swimming and drown in our ignorance.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
What Would Socrates Say?
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For the author to believe that Google is not here to be a helpful guide but to become distructful because it is there to answer and questions we may have. To have this data just given to us brings to show that we can't learn on our own and thus we are suffering in our ignorance? I believe Google is a way of finding something out that anyone may have any curiousity or need a way of finding something out. It is nice to have something there that can answer any questions or concerns about. Just because people use Google as a way of finding helpful/useful data does not mean we are not learning on our own. We learn daily without the internet, the internet is there to help us through our daily lives. It makes things easier.
ReplyDeleteGreat job with the quotation sandwich near the end.
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