The advent of the Internet is the greatest discovery of the era. He has firmly entered our lives. We can find scientific articles, tutorials, recipes, and even ways to grow rare flowers online. Simply put, now we can find everything. “I’ll find it on the net,” “I’ll google it,” these phrases began to sound in the everyday life of an office worker, doctor, teacher, and, of course, a schoolchild. Everyone uses the internet.
Just some twenty years ago, in order to find the information we were interested in, we had to go to the library, order the right book and write out what we needed from it. Now there is no need for this.
Although you can find a lot of interesting things on the World Wide Web, there is also a lot of various “garbage” there. After all, the network is a huge pit, and, as you know, everything can be poured into it, not only something important and useful, but also what, alas, is called “slop”. Therefore, having read information from the Internet, one cannot call oneself an intelligent and educated person. A well-known proverb says: “Trust, but verify.” And we all need to remember this.
Vasily Shukshin has a short story “Cut off”. The hero Gleb Kapustin boasted to his fellow villagers that he could “cut off” any person with his questions. Of course, there was no Internet at that time, but Gleb, picking up “smart” phrases from newspapers and magazines, considered himself the wisest in the village. It gave him exorbitant pleasure to confound educated and cultured people. Once a candidate of science Zhuravlev came to Grandma Agafya from the city. Kapustin went to the visitors and began to ask his “abstruse questions” from the moon and stars to shamans. By virtue of his education and upbringing, Zhuravlev did not get involved with the blockhead, but he boasted that he had “cut off” the candidate of sciences as well. Today, such Kapustins are called “sofa experts.”
Therefore, in order not to be like such characters, we must check any information gleaned from the Internet. The reliability of information is very important, and the distortion of historical facts and scientific data can turn a person into an amateur.
The problem of ignorance and inflated self-esteem is found today both on television and in print. When you read articles or essays, you get the impression that they are all written by one abstract journalist. Identical phrases, speech clichés and clericalisms, language turns, words-parasites and words-weeds “roam” from one reportage to another.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to completely protect children from false information. And the responsibility lies with the parents and the children themselves. You need to start with yourself. With these words, Elena Likhach, a poetess from St. Petersburg, ended her message at the final conference on the safety of children in the digital environment. And then she answered questions from the audience for a long time.
Speakers and experts from all over the post-Soviet space answered questions from the audience. And the performance of Anton Fadeev from Moscow was recognized as the best. So is the Internet a friend or an enemy? You decide!