A professor at the University of Brighton has placed a ban on her students using two of the world’s most beloved websites. No, not Facebook or Girls Gone Wild, these students have been told they cannot use Google or Wikipedia. Surely access to these sites are basic human rights?
I was going to do a little experiment and get on with my day sans Wikipedia and Google and report back on my progress, then I realised I actually had quite a lot to be getting on with and a self-imposed ban would just slow me down too much. Yes I could use other sites to find my answers, but why should I? I could wash all my dishes up after dinner but Joesphine Cochrane invented the dishwasher for a reason (now there’s a clever woman, read about her on Wikipedia). But according to professor Tara Brabazon, students have grown too accustomed to taking “the easy option when asked to do research.”
But isn’t that what clever humans are meant to do? Take the easy option? What sort of initiative is someone showing when they sit in a library full of dusty tomes looking for that key date when they could have just asked Google and got a result in a nano second?
As a specialist in Eastern European economics (of all things) I can quickly admit that Wikipedia isn’t going to be much use to me when trying to write a hefty analysis on mass privatization in post socialist economies, but blimey it can be a good place to start. Tara Brabazon must know that her students can’t get any real in-depth research done on these sites, but as a starting point who can fault them? Has she banned Google Scholar? Surely this Google spin-off is as legitimate as it gets…it’s a students best friend when it’s 3 a.m and the library is closed.
If you found your next home online, would you be disappointed that you hadn’t worked hard to find it? Would you feel like you should have traipsed round estate agent offices on a Saturday afternoon, read through every abbreviated property listing in the local supplements, and driven around the area looking for ‘for sale’ boards outside well kept houses? Of course you wouldn’t.
If there’s a quicker way of doing something, then you’re a fool if you’re not doing it. Clever people are building clever sites to make everybody else’s lives easier, and for this we should be grateful. To resist the internet seems, to me at least, utter nonsense.
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