The Loneliness of the Interconnected is an essay on
how the internet has made it easier for people to become isolated, while being
in the midst of everything. The author, Charles Seife, proposes that humans
have strong mental foundations based on opinions we form throughout our lives. As
we encounter information that opposes what we think we tend to shy away from
it, and figure it to be lies. The goal of his essay is to illustrate to the
young adults and children of the internet age, that they should not be so
close-minded on their beliefs. The author uses facts and relevant examples to demonstrate
how the internet links us to an unimaginable amounts of information and people,
and with these resources people tend to gravitate towards the opinions on which
their foundations were formed. People will seek out the knowledge that they
want to hear and band together to form a cult of similar minded web surfers. Seife
wants us as a society to understand how we can benefit from the helpful aspects
of the internet, while simultaneously trying to fight against human nature and prevent
from being intellectually isolated. The internet itself is a never ending
library filled with valuable information that can be accessed in seconds and
we, the users, unintentionally dictate what we see. This is beneficial to
society because we can automatically have access to the information we want,
however it can also prevent us from seeing the other side of the coin and only
be narrow minded. That is the thin line that society now a days has to learn to
balance on. Are we going to be robots to the information that is funneled into
our computer screens, or are we going to be self-thinkers and be able to
process factual information even if we do not want to see it?
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