Essay about the internet "Some people say that the internet provides people with a lot of valuable information. Others think access to so much information creates problems. Which view do you agree with?" There is no doubt that the internet has changed the way people keep informed. By typing a couple of words in a search engine we can have access to centuries of knowledge, and the latest news can be read at the blink of an eye just by scrolling the social networks, often before they are broadcast in the news. However, the other side of the coin is that the Net has become increasingly teemed with unnecessary or even fake data. This has led to the spreading opinion that the internet has worsened the quality of the information we are provided with, but the problem doesn’t lie in the technology itself, rather in the people’s ability to differentiate the truth from the false. Before reading an article we should always ponder over its reliability. Is it written in a specialized journal? Is it up-to-date? Is it in line with what the scientific community affirm? By answering to these simple questions it is not that hard to skim the most obvious absurdities. This critical process should always be active, and it doesn’t matter if it involved a piece of information obtained by reading an article online or written on paper. Indeed the same people that struggle dealing with the hustle of the internet are not immune to fake news and to skewed data gained from the so-called “real world”. The problems that afflict people online and offline, in their essence, are the same. The internet has been a watershed in the availability of the sources of information, but their selection is always up to the individual. Was it different in the last centuries? It was even worse, because in order to rule out if something was false one needed plenty of time, extensive researches in different libraries and, in the end, simply had to trust what was written in the available books. Not to mention that most of the population couldn’t afford to purchase encyclopedias, or even to receive a basic form of education. Technological innovation has had a far-reaching impact in this regard, and therefore culture, to some extent, is not a prerogative of a cliquey circle anymore. People tend to live in the present, without considering the wider picture. An excess of information is better than its lack, and most of the hardships related to the skimming of data were even worse in the ripe old decades.