<p>I personally think this is a fairly difficult question to come up examples for.</p>
<p>Prompt - Has today's abundance of information only made it more difficult for us to understand the world around us?</p>
<p>Anyone know any solid examples to agree or disagree to this prompt?</p>
<p>Yeah, a couple weeks ago this company that decided it was a good idea to attach wifi stations to homeless people at South by Southwest and have people pay the homeless person to use their wifi. The media immediately got all over the company talking about how they were manipulating homeless people and how they are awful people. Then, NPR ran a good story a couple days later about how the abundance of information about this company and news outlets wanting to get the news out as fast as possible chastising the company stopped anybody from answering the most important question: what do the homeless people think about this? It turns out the homeless LOVED it; they were able to earn money as well as socialize with people, something they normally don’t get to do. In the end of the interview NPR ended by saying the media, them included, really dropped the ball on that story.</p>
<p>the situation <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/technology/homeless-as-wi-fi-transmitters-creates-a-stir-in-austin.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/technology/homeless-as-wi-fi-transmitters-creates-a-stir-in-austin.html</a></p>
<p>I couldn’t find the NPR story.</p>
<p>You could say that technological progress is actually conducive to our understanding of the world.</p>
<p>The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th century brought a vast array of technological progress. The workers were enriched by this technological progress and decided to campaign for moral upliftment and education. They were ultimately successful, and thus technological progress led to a better standard of living and a better understanding of the world by means of education.</p>
<p>The Clean Air Act of 1973 came into being mainly because the awareness of the need for unpolluted air was propogated through technology. Therefore, people were made aware of issues that plagued their society because of technology.</p>
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<p>This is one of those questions that people like to consider difficult, simply because the fail to just think a little bit outside the box…</p>
<p>Just think of ways that people are educated / informed of things today, then make a basic argument…</p>
<p>Here are some examples I thought of right away:
State of the Union Address —> the President helps us understand what’s going on, etc. You would have to think of a specific address and how it changed people’s understanding of the world, or whatever. You can also think of another instance of a president giving an important speech to the world. Nixon’s speech that contained the infamous “I am not a crook” line is a good example, since this eventually lead us to become cynical of our national leaders and change our understanding of national leaders…
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley –> Dr. Frankenstein learned a lot from books (and you would have to explain how his ready access to books shows there’s an abundance of information), but this skewed the way he saw the world, made him more dark, etc…
The creation & development of televisions —> lead to more ready access to news (i.e. information). Some bad things that have happened because of television: Americans actually saw what was happening in Vietnam, thus completely changing most Americans’ views on the war (and then you’d have to argue how that changed their view about the world). Something else: the media provides a lot of info, a lot of it is skewed or worded or reported in ways to influence people to develop a specific point of view. This, in change, changes how people understand the world around them… then you’d have to think of specific instances where this happened. One example: Woodward and Bersntein were the 2 reporters who discovered and exploited the whole watergate issue… eventually this changed how people saw the President and how people generally understood national leaders and the government</p>
<p>These examples, besides for the State of the Union one, are all examples that I’ve researched for the purpose of the SAT essay. Basically, this prompt is definitely one that you can bring researched examples into.</p>
<p>You can easily discuss the science of neuroplasticity and the internet. A book I’d use would be “The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains” and I’d most likely include a personal experience, as the writer of this book himself did. Basically, neuroplasticity is when our brains can physically change to adapt to the things we do daily. With the abundance of information, we aren’t attentive and giving deep thought to a certain subject as we ourselves are subject to the Internet’s abundance of unnecessary additional information while trying to do so. This information causes us to overload our brains, or, more specifically, our working memory, and are thus inept to deep thinking which allows us to better our conception of the world. Working memory is also practically the fundamental cause for consciousness; the better we are at manipulating information, holding it in our brains, and transferring it to long-term memory, the better we are at deepening what makes us different from the other species: having an ‘increased level’ of consciousness.</p>