Sometimes I look forward to the end-ofsemester
rush, when students’ final papers
come streaming into my office and mailbox. I
could have hundreds of pages of original
thought to read and evaluate. Once in a
while, it is truly exciting to a question I’ve
asked the class to discuss.
But this past semester was different.
I noticed a disturbing decline in both the
quality of the writing and the originality of
the thoughts expressed. What had happened
since last fall? Did I ask worse questions? Were
my students unusually lazy? No. My class had
fallen victim to the latest easy way of writing a
paper: doing their research on the World-Wide-
Web.
It’s easy to spot a research paper that is
based primarily on information collected from
the Web. First, the bibliography cites no books,
just articles or pointers to places in that virtual
land somewhere off any map: http://www.etc.
Then a strange preponderance of material in the
bibliography is curiously out of date. A lot of
stuff on the Web that is advertised as timely is
actually at least a few years old. (One student
submitted a research paper last semester in which
all of his sources were articles published between
September and December 1995; that was
probably the times span of the Web page on
which he found them.)
Another clue is the beautiful pictures
and graphs that are inserted into the body of the
student’s text. They look impressive, as though
they were the result of careful work and analysis,
but actually they often bear little relation to the
precise subject of the paper. Cut and pasted
from the vast realm of what’s out there for the
taking, they masquerade as original work.
Accompanying them are unattributed
(no credit given to the original author) quotes (in
which one can’t tell who made the statement or
in what context ) and curiously detailed
references to the kinds of things that are easy to
find on the Web (pages and pages of federal
documents, corporate propaganda, or snippets of
commentary by people whose credibility is
difficult to assess). Sadly, one finds few
references to careful, in-depth commentaries on
the subject of the paper, the kind of analysis that
requires a book, rather than an article, for its full
development.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no neo-
Luddite (someone who believes new technology
is bad or wrong). I am as enchanted as anyone
else is by the potential of this new technology to
provide instant information. But too much of
what passes for information these days is simply
advertising for information. Screen after screen
shows you where you can find out more, how
you can connect to this place or that. The acts of
linking and networking and randomly jumping
from here to there become as exciting or
rewarding as actually finding anything of
intellectual value.
Search Engines, with their half-baked
algorithms, are closer to slot machines than to
library catalogues. You throw you query to the
wind, and who knows what will come back to
you? You may get 234,468 supposed references
to whatever you want to know. Perhaps one in a
thousand might actually help you. But it’s easy
to be sidetracked or frustrated as you try to go
through those Web pages one by one.
Unfortunately, they’re not arranged in order of
importance.
What I’m describing is the hunt-andpeck
method of writing a paper. We all know
that word processing makes many first drafts
look far more polished than they are. If the
paper doesn’t reach the assigned five pages,
readjust the margins, change the font size, and . .
. voila! Of course, those machinations take up
time that the students could have spent revising
the paper. With programs to check one’s
spelling and grammar now standard features on
most computers, one wonders why students
make any mistakes at all. But errors are as
prevalent as ever, no matter how crisp the
typeface. Instead of becoming perfectionists, too
many students have become slackers, preferring
to let the machine do their work for them.
What the Web adds to the shortcuts
made possible by word processing is to make
research look too easy. You toss a query to the
machine, wait a few minutes, and suddenly a lot
of possible sources of information appear on
your screen. Instead of books that you have to
check out of the library, read carefully,
understand, synthesize, and then tactfully
excerpt, these sources are quips, blips, pictures,
and short summaries that may be downloaded
magically to the dorm-room computer screen.
Fabulous, How simple! The only problem is that
a paper consisting of summaries of summaries is
bound to be fragmented and superficial, and to
demonstrate more of a random montage than an
ability to sustain an argument through 10 to 15
double-spaced pages,
Of course, you can’t blame the students
for ignoring books. When college libraries are
diverting funds from books to computer
technology that will be obsolete in two years at
most, they send a clear message to students:
Don’t read, just connect. Surf. Download. Cut
and paste. Originality becomes hard to separate
from plagiarism if no author is cited on a Web
page. Clearly, the words are up for grabs, and
students much prefer the fabulous jumble to the
hard work of stopping to think and make sense
of what they’ve read.
Libraries used to be repositories of
words and ideas. Now they are seen as centers
for the retrieval of information. Some of this
information comes from other, bigger libraries,
in the form of books that can take time to obtain
through interlibrary loan. What happens to the
many students (some things never change) who
scramble to write a paper the night before it’s
due? The computer screen, the gateway to the
world sitting right on their desks, promises
instant access—but actually offers only a pale,
two-dimensional version of a real library.
But it’s also my fault. I take much of
the blame for the decline in quality of student
research in my classes. I need to teach students
how to read, to take time with language ideas, to
work through arguments, to synthesize disparate
(different) sources to come up with original
thought. I need to help my students understand
how to assess sources to determine their
credibility, as well as to trust their own ideas
more than snippets of thought that materialize on
a screen. The placelessness (blamelessness) of
the Web leads to an ethereal (intangible or
vaporous) randomness of thought. Gone are the
pathways of logic and passion, the sense of the
progress of an argument. Chance holds sway,
and it more often misses than hits. Judgment
must be taught, as well as the methods of
exploration.
I’m seeing my students’ attention spans
wane and their ability to reason for themselves
decline. I wish that the university’s computer
system would crash for a day, so that I could
encourage them to go outside, sit under a tree,
and read a really good book—from start to
finish. I’d like them to sit for a while and ponder
what it means to live in a world where some
things get easier and easier so rapidly that we can
hardly keep track of how easy they’re getting,
while other tasks remain as hard as ever—such
as doing research and writing a good paper that
teaches the writer something in the process.
Knowledge does not emerge in a vacuum, but we
do need silence and space for sustained thought.
Next semester, I’m going to urge my students to
turn off their glowing boxes and think, if only
once in a while.
David Rothenburg is an associate professor of
philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of
Technology. He is the author of Hand’s End:
Technology and the Limits of Nature (University
of California Press, 1993) and editor of Terra
Nova: Journal of Nature and Culture (M.I.T.
Press).
Rothenberg, David. “How the Web Destroys the Quality of Students’ Research Papers” Chronicles of
Higher Education. 43(49), p.A44 15, August 1997.
In his article ‘’ How the web destroys the quality of student’s research papers’’ Rothenberg claims that people give the web far too much power over their lives and consciousness and the web destroys the quality of student’s research papers. I mostly disagree with the writer.
The writer thinks that students waste their precious time by using the web excessively and people give it too much power over their lives, but technology is everywhere and without using it people can’t finish their work in a very limited time. Furthermore, teachers use technological devices in school and they give students a lot of homework and research tasks. Therefore there is no other option to be able to complete this stuff in a short time without using the web.
Moreover, students can find loads of information simultaneously from different sources via the internet instead of searching into books or encyclopedias. Thus, they both use their time efficiently and collect more information. As far as they are aware of their responsibilities, they will use the internet and other technological devices effectively, which don’t give them any negative consequences.
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