Why Students Prefer The Internet Over Books
Whether you are riding a bus or train, having an after dinner coffee at your favorite coffee shop or simply enjoying a light banter with your family at the living room, a deluge of information reaches you through the internet. It is one product of man's ingenuity that absolutely defies time, space and gravity. The computer, whatever sizes and forms they come, definitely knows no bounds as the power it has and it does to us and to our daily lives cannot be expressed in numbers and beyond description.
Today, it has become the favorite tools of students in their research activities and favored more than books and libraries do. The internet and the library are both considered huge depository of knowledge where a vast source of information, records and documents are stored. They both serve similar objective - that is to provide knowledge. However due to innovations in technology, the computer have come to replace libraries and the internet with books at an unprecedented rate. Thus, the digital information technology has dramatically altered the methods that faculty and students access information.
Why do students prefer the internet over books? What is in it that the youth are hooked to it like drug addicts in dire need of some shots? What has brought the dramatic decline in the number of library users? Can we see the future with libraries being phased-out totally? Since the mid 90's, the declining trend in library users has been well-documented. A study conducted for a period of ten years revealed that library transactions have decreased by about 21 percent while circulations declined to 35 percent along with the decline in print media publication.
One seen reason why the internet is favored over books is due to the uniformity of its information. As libraries do not offer the same sets of information, the internet does. A certain topic about history of a particular country for example will vary from one country to another and will depend on the author of the book. An American author for example writing for his own country's history will provide more factual and extensive information and exhaustive in providing facts compared to an Asian writing about American culture.
The universality of information provided by the internet can be accessed by individuals from all points of the world guaranteeing that the same information is being feed to students with internet connections from the northern hemispheres to the southern part of the world as there are no regional or local versions of information. More to say, the information is generic to all even if the internet is translated to several languages.
Laptops, and desktops computers and internet-ready cellular phones have made the internet accessible anywhere around the world. Whether one is having lunch or riding a bus, information can be accessed compared to going to the libraries where elements such as time and energy are considered. The computers indeed provided for a multi-tasking method that libraries do not offer. Furthermore, the internet gives information within seconds after navigation to links, which books do not do.