Whether you’re traveling by bus or train, having an after-dinner coffee at your favorite cafe, or simply enjoying a light chat with your family in the living room, a flood of information is pouring into you via the Internet. It is a product of man’s ingenuity that absolutely defies time, space and gravity. The computer, regardless of the sizes and shapes it comes in, definitely has no limits, as the power it has and holds for us and our daily lives cannot be expressed in numbers and beyond description.
Today, it has become the preferred tool of students in their research activities and has been favored over books and libraries. Internet and library are considered as great repositories of knowledge where a great source of information, records and documents are stored. Both have a similar goal, that is, to provide knowledge. However, due to innovations in technology, the computer has come to replace libraries and the Internet with books at an unprecedented rate. Therefore, digital information technology has drastically altered the methods by which teachers and students access information.
Why do students prefer the Internet to books? What is it about him that young people are hooked on him like drug addicts in desperate need of a few shots? What has caused the drastic decline in the number of library users? Can we see the future with libraries being removed entirely? Since the mid-1990s, the downward trend in library users has been well documented. A study conducted over a ten-year period revealed that library transactions have declined by 21 percent, while circulations have dropped by 35 percent along with the decline in publication in print media.
One of the reasons why the Internet is preferred to books is due to the uniformity of its information. Because libraries don’t offer the same sets of information, the Internet does. A certain topic on the history of a particular country, for example, will vary from country to country and will depend on the author of the book. An American author, for example, writing about the history of her own country will provide more objective, extensive, and comprehensive information in providing data than an Asian writing about American culture.
People from all parts of the world can access the universality of information provided by the Internet, which ensures that students with Internet connections from the northern hemispheres to the southern part of the world receive the same information, since there are no connections regional or local information versions. What’s more, the information is generic for everyone, even if the Internet is translated into several languages.
Internet-ready laptops, desktop computers, and cell phones have made the Internet accessible anywhere in the world. Whether you’re eating lunch or riding the bus, information can be accessed compared to going to libraries, where things like time and energy are considered. In fact, computers provided a method of multitasking that libraries do not. Also, the Internet provides information within seconds of browsing the links, which books do not.