Sam Bedinger
Professor Meehan
5/2/10
Reflection:
As I revise this essay I will be attempting to strengthen my thesis by reinforcing the importance of acquiring a deep reading state. I also intend on restating and elaborating on why Wikipedia is not a legitimate source because it lacks meaning, and takes away from the reality of the classroom experience. The importance of the classroom experience is in effect what defines us as a generation of students. Since the reality of our classroom experience has constantly been changing each generation is defined differently. The difference between my father’s experience and mine is so great we would not even consider the other to be a legitimate student. By grouping and reorganizing my essay I will attempt to combine certain points therefore strengthening my essay. By going back and thinking this essay from the ground up, I will take my ideas further and elaborate more on the point of each paragraph. Essentially clarifying my point and helping my audience understand my thoughts and ideas more clearly. After reading this essay I believe my audience should understand through technology students have in fact become more lazy, and have been stripped of their rightful classroom reality. The reality which our fathers experienced, where things are learned from people and life experiences, not technology. Technology has in a sense made life easy for us, students no longer must spend the allotted time looking information up because the information is spoon fed to us through technology and online sources such as Wikipedia. I believe you can learn this through my critical evaluation of Wikipedia as an online text.
Critically Evaluating Wikipedia as an Online Text
Wikipedia has become one of the most renowned encyclopedias in the last five years. Due to Wikipedia’s major success in revolutionizing how people use encyclopedias, people have lost the use for hard back copies of encyclopedias such as World Book. The very purpose of Wikipedia was to create an easy to use online encyclopedia. However when critically evaluating Wikipedia as a legitimate online text there are possible arguments for both sides. Wikipedia is not a legitimate text because articles offer no deep reading, they lack meaning, they take away from the reality of the classroom experience, and also any information acquired from the text cannot be deemed as credible information.
When trying to accomplish deep reading, time is a requirement because it takes time to acquire a mind-set. Deep reading is the mind-set where nothing else matters. You are so lost in your false reality created by the book or text, reality seems to not even exist. Birkerts, who touches on this idea of deep reading, would say “Electricity… is about immediacy; it is in the nature of current to surmount impedances. Electricity is, implicitly, of the moment- now…. Duration is deep time, time experienced without the awareness of time passing”(Birkerts 219). Wikipedia offers a quick and easy way to acquire information. Wikipedia through technology has made the answer to any question as simple as taking out your smart phone, which has 4G network, and looking it up. Readers would find the information they need then move on to another topic. Technology in this sense has led us away from reality. Information and knowledge is no longer learn the natural way. For so many years people learn in a classroom setting. What they learned in school and from day-to-day life was all they knew. This was a time before technology, when you could not look up Phi Sigma on the internet and instantly know it was founded in 1782 by George Washington. Once again in order to acquire deep reading, readers have to spend time reading. By making it easier for readers to acquire a basic understanding they do not need to spend the time required to read the article completely. Reading the whole article would take a duration of time, a time it would take to acquire that certain mind-set. One where you can get lost in the pages and nothing matters except the words inscribed on the page. Wikipedia has in effect has stripped readers of a false reality because articles lack meaning and deep thought. All there is on Wikipedia is fact, there is no thought required to read Wiki articles.
Wikipedia is a source for information which anyone can post information on. The fact information posted on Wikipedia does not always come from a scholarly source, and could be false or incorrect, is the reason Wikipedia is not a source one should go to and quote directly from. Even though this is made very easy to do seeing Wikipedia was made so that users could quickly pin point information. Non-credible information serves as a problem for many college students, who use Wikipedia daily to look up answers quickly. This may cause students to get crucial information wrong which could lead to a bad grade on a paper. Teachers know this and advise students not to use Wikipedia as a primary resource, but pupils continue to use it because of its simplicity.
Even though the articles are not always from a credible source most of them are. Wikipedia has editors who edit the posts daily. Since posts are edited by scholars, the posts may be considered a good starting point for papers. However, readers should find a credible source confirming the information posted on Wikipedia. By using Wikipedia as a starting point a basic understanding of the material is attained, but readers should find credible sources to quote from in their paper.
By making information so easy to acquire, Wikipedia has in effect made readers lazy. No longer is there a need to use hard text copies of encyclopedias. Because the information has become so much easier and, in effect, more efficient when gathered from an online text, Wikipedia allows students to complete assignments quicker. Quicker does not always mean more correct, and if students weren’t so lazy they would look it up in their text. By using the appropriate text, students would acquire the correct information the first time around. However, Wikipedia enables users to understand the key points of an article, but then serves as a source for distraction because the page is covered in links, which may send you to other related articles. Readers no longer need to read a whole article to grasp the basic understanding of said article, but instead they acquire a basic overview of the topic in the first paragraph. Therefore readers do not sit and read Wikipedia articles for hours on end. Therefore concluding Wikipedia does not serve as a source for meaningful deep reading.
However, there are counter arguments, that express a positive side to Wikipedia. The reason Wikipedia became so useful in the first place is because Wikipedia serves as a quick and immediate source for information. By making information so easy to attain people started to use Wikipedia daily to acquire a basic understanding of current events. Many people like college students need a quick and easy source for basic information; it makes doing homework much easier. Who would want to spend the extra five minutes required to look up article in a hard text encyclopedia, when they could just type it in and get immediate results? Remember “Electricity… is about immediacy” and that is what people today want. Immediacy allows people the option to complete tasks quicker and without complication. Essentially reducing the potential for error by supplying information quickly first time around.
There are also enough articles on a variety of topics to compare to an encyclopedia, and many of these articles offer readers a more comprehensible understanding of the topic. Not only does Wikipedia offer a variety of topics, nearly three and a half million, it also offers them in a variety of languages. People all over the world can use Wikipedia because it is offered in ten different languages. Users can use Wikipedia to look up nearly anything from cooking recipes to historical documents.
The question is: in order for a text to be considered literal, do you need to acquire a deep reading state? The answer is yes. A literal source has to offer deep reading so that readers can escape into a false reality, as Birkerts explains. “What no one seems to be acknowledging, what is at the root of the crisis of the art, is the fact that nature of reality, of the average person’s experience of reality, has changed, changed utterly”(Birkerts 205). No longer is the reality of the classroom a teacher reading notes from a book, and writing those notes on the board in chalk. Instead the reality of today’s classroom is run by a projector and a laptop. The face of academia has changed, “changed utterly” since my father was in school, actually since my brother was in school. I personally have seen this change, when I was in lower school my teachers never used laptops and all their grades were written down in a grade book. By high school every teacher was using power point presentations, and everything they needed was contained in their laptop. The reason for this is because technology is constantly evolving making everything easier today than it was a week ago. The reason why my generation is considered the technology generation is because technology has evolved more during our time than it has in any other.
There are many reasons Wikipedia is a good source for acquiring information. It is quick, easy and offers readers a good understanding on a variety of topics. The fact that many articles are not written by credible sources makes Wikipedia a non reliable resource. Wikipedia serves a good source for acquiring basic info, but it does not always supply readers with accurate information. Wikipedia is in a sense a pin pointing resource, which makes finding information fast and easy. By making information so easily accessible readers are not able to access a deep reading state making Wikipedia not a literal source. Without allowing readers the option of acquiring a deep reading state Wikipedia has once again change the reality of the classroom. Therefore, Wikipedia in effect serves as a distraction for users trying to reach a deep reading state because it lacks meaning. Meaning is in a sense purpose and without purpose Wikipedia cannot be considered a legitimate source.
Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies. The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York, 1994.
