Which World Takes Precedence

In Chapter 2 John Phelan talks about disconnection with reality. How the internet takes us away from the real world. It acts as a distraction from real action in the world. Gumpert and Drucker also talk about the loss of the connection to the real world. They talk about how this didn’t start with the internet, but rather how it started with television. Making the home entertainment center the central to our lives is a perfect analogy for what the internet has become to our lives as students. Phelan talks about how as a teacher he is very dependent on email and digitized texts from all the libraries of the world. With this technology he finds it “timely and inescapably available” to send instructions and information to his students and most importantly receive their requests and questions at any time of the day. As a student I share the same respect for email and blackboard that Phelan has access to as a professor. It is impossible to stay away from the computer as a college student. Although computers and the internet may suggest negative impacts with disconnecting from reality, I find when dealing with school work the internet can be a positive disconnection. When I am alone, with just me and my computer, I can do work and feel like I have fallen onto the page with my words and the words of the scholars I have searched for inspiration and knowledge. Yes there will always be the tempting and distracting social networking systems and other entertainments that can be found on the web, but I have found these to help me take a break from my work when I have lost myself in the computer. Although, there have been times when I had spent so many hours in front of a computer screen, that I have turned to other ways to get away from these mind absorbing sites that disconnect us with the real world. But at the same time, what is the “real world” anymore? Everyone you have to communicate with you can access on the internet. And everything you have questions about you can just simply punch into Google. So when the concerns arise about the internet disconnecting us with reality, we should ask ourselves which world takes precedence?