Hello!
Question:
Contemporary technology makes available many small pieces of factual information. As a result, people have become so preoccupied with bits of fragmented information that they pay too little attention to the larger issues and overall perspectives.
Answer:
In my view, the statement is too extreme in two respects. At first it fails to acknowledge that new technologies, like Internet, provide not merely fragmented information; secondly, before the appearance of new technologies the situation was quite similar: the most of the information didn’t concern global issues. Moreover, it’s in humans’ nature to gather small parts of knowledge from manifold sources and apply them in order to understand wider concepts.
Contemporary technologies provide us with immense amount of information, which isn’t as coherent as we want. People could easier express their opinion to the broad audience today, using the Internet or television, and easier receive the information by the similar sources. As the result there is a lot of informational rubbish mixed with the valuable data that is often scattered. Nevertheless, whether the information is fragmented and hackneyed or concerning large issues, depends on the particular source. For example there are few television broadcast, paying deep attention to overall perspectives like the purpose of the humankind. On the other hand, there are many Internet sites, which contain detailed explanations of global issues and articles by the greatest philosophers of the present. One could say that in the past the situation was completely different. But I would disagree with him, because the main sources of information: books and discussions have had the same meaning now and, like in the past, a few people really worry about holistic problems. Up-to-date technologies merely expand the number of possible sources of intelligence.
Often, it’s not so good to pay a great attention to enormous issues of civilization. People have to live their own lives, do their own work and raise their own children; otherwise a person could become a sluggard or insane, thinking about quite abstract things. However, he may become a great philosopher too. I believe that it’s an advantage rather than a flaw when one could simply find the information how to fix a concrete problem in his car instead of reading about overall principles of the engine’s operation. Opponents of such practical approach argue that we have to understand the overall concepts so as to develop ourselves. Certainly, we should do it; but the concrete information is much more useful in our daily lives.
Finally, I could say that it’s not so bad that sometimes information is incomplete and too narrow. Gathering all the facts together and thinking them over, we have acquired our own perception of the surrounding events and see overall perspectives from our own standpoints. I believe that it’s much more interesting than grasp and accept someone’s opinion. One university in the US has a motto: “If you know where to find the information, you already know a half of it”. It reflects my opinion that the main purpose of education isn’t the simply learning of certain formulae; by education we rather learn how to gather and process information effectively. So, the huge amount of concrete information isn’t so bad; we simply have to understand how to cope with it properly.
In sum, modern technologies give us a lot of information: useless and useful, specific and abstract. And it’s out purpose to process it and to find explanations of concrete and global problems.
