24 October 2005
Personally speaking, the Internet, also known as the information-super-highway, as it has been called, has had a profound impact on people’s lives. With the click of just one button, one has the whole world at ones fingertips. At any given moment one can log on to the World Wide Web, go to a search engine and browse through millions of topics, virtually anything that comes to mind. Likewise, one has the capability to send an e-mail to a best friend, have an instant message conversation, or a live video chat with a relatives half way across the world. The Internet holds infinite possibilities and it is a genius tool for those that know how to use it properly. However, not everyone shares this opinion about the internet. In his article, “Why I Don’t Compute,” Roger Rosenblatt exclaims: “Not only is a computer slower than a typewriter in the long run, its research function is also faulty; and worst of all, it encourages a society of increasing isolations (though it claims the opposite)” (532) and discusses three key reasons why he doesn’t compute.
Rosenbaltt claims that a computer is slower and less efficient than a typewriter and also hinders writers’ creativity and productivity. He says, “Slower than a typewriter? Yes, even slower than a Bic ballpoint pen, my principal machine, because a word processor (what a name!) facilitates bad writing by way of fast and easy
corrections” (532).You can say that Rosenblatt likes to do things the old-fashioned way; he feels that writing should be difficult and it should be done carefully, slowly and
with minimal corrections. He next offers a critique of doing research on the Internet. “A computer offers nowhere near the same capacity for serendipity that a stroll through the stacks of a library offers” (532). Doing research in the library is of course unarguably the best approach. But, if one knows what he’s looking for, one is almost...