How electronic access to information influences our everyday lives in positive and negative ways

By Mark Kestenberg

The access to information that we have in our everyday lives has numerous effects on us, both positive and negative. In order to explore deeper into what the different types of electronic information there are and their effects, I will be breaking it down into different categories. The first is social media/social networking.

Social Media/networking has grown incredibly fast over the past decade.Around 310 million users used twitter per month in 2017(1). Those numbers only represent twitter, which along side with Facebook, YouTube and Whatsapp are the most popular social networking sites of 2017(2).

After looking at the effects of social media as a whole, there are plenty of it has on us.Starting with the negative effects,a study done by researchers on chron.com(3) showed that social media causes decreased productivity.

It's reasoning is that their study concluded that Facebook in the workplace "shaves off 1.5% of office productivity". On a personal level, social media also has proven to give it's users a false sense of connection, has become a breeding ground for cyber bullying ever since its creation, and many social media platforms have run into issues revolving around privacy.

While these negative effects are significant, you could say the same about the positive effects it has on society. The most noticeable effect that social media has made, is instant communication. Not only can social networking sites get your message to a friend quickly, it can send your message to almost anywhere in the world, which means that in addition to instant messaging, social media has the means to connect the world.

The second type of electronic information we can access, are wikis. Wikis are websites that allow collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users.

One of the most famous wiki's currently is Wikipedia, which posts articles on a wide variety of topics.

While its credibility is debated as a result of its public editing/posting, there is no doubt that it can be incredibly useful for research. As of 2016 there were 17 million articles(4), with the number increasing everyday. While the positive effects of wikis/Wikipedia seem endless, there are negative aspects. An article in The Atlantic suggested that instant information encourages shortened attention spans, and makes it harder to concentrate for longer periods of time. In addition to this, the article stated that if you gave someone a topic, and asked them to find it, on the internet people gave up quicker compared to if they did it in a book.

Electronic information is very open in Canada, meaning that we are allowed (within legal boundaries) to look up, download and upload whatever we want. This is not the case all over the world, as a result of censorship.

Censorship by definition is the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security. While as stated above, Canada has little online censorship, other countries such as China or Saudi Arabia have very tight online censorship. The map below shows the state of online censorship on countries across the world.

As the map illustrates a good portion of countries across the world are not in a green colour. This means that most countries do have electronic information, but just not the same access that we in Canada and North America have. To summarize, electronic access to information affects us in both positive and negative ways, everyday all over the world.

How electronic access to information influences our everyday lives in positive and negative ways

By Mark Kestenberg

Bibliography

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