I have spoken with a lot of veteran teachers who claim that students don't work as hard or are as well trained as they used to be. They also feel that cheating is much more frequent today than it used to be, and that students don't feel like it's necessarily wrong to cheat. I think a lot of those sentiments are common, with every generation feeling like important values are in decline and things were better back in the day.
I do think cheating is more common and more acceptable now than it was 20 years ago. I think a big part of that is due to Napster. I don't mean that Napster is to blame for any perceived decline in morality among young people, I mean that it was the first thing to really capitalize on the best things about the internet: free, fast, everyone.
Napster would let you download any song you could find for free, of course. That means that everyone who put songs up to share and grabbed songs to listen to could get those songs in a fast, free manner. This is very different than the prior system, where I could only get songs from a friend. We both needed a blank tape or cd, and a system to record the music from one to the next, and had to actually possess the music already. That's not a system that is going to cripple the music industry. It wasn't fast, free, everyone. It was slow, a few bucks, and limited to my very small circle of friends.
Napster let me get all kinds of songs I wanted and didn't really want. But what's important is this: it never crossed my mind that it might be right or wrong. It just didn't. I was in high school, the songs were there for me to listen to and make mix-cd's with, and no one seemed to care.
This idea that everything should be free grew from that. I can watch movies on youtube, catch up on old shows in a million different places, and have all the information in the universe at my disposal. Fast, free, everyone. I believe that the freedom and ease of the internet has crept into many other realms of society, especially among young people. If test answers are available, they are probably fast, free and for everyone. If a video game can be downloaded, it too is fast and free. It's really hard to stop and think about the morality and ethics of things that come so easy and quickly.
Maybe this leads to the occupy movement at some level as well. I know that Occupy Your Town has a lot of different things they are complaining about, but one key sign that I see often is "bailout my student loans," or something to that effect. Why aren't there free, easy jobs for people to get? Why wasn't there free education? So much in life has been free up to this point, why does the system change so fast? The internet is a huge piece to this sense of entitlement that we see among 20-somethings and under, in my opinion.
Now the senate is considering a law that allows the government to shut down websites that violate copyright laws. Most of the fun, free stuff would go away, including tons of youtube videos, all torrenting/streaming sites that don't have rights to their content, and loads of other related sites. Most of my facebook friends that comment on this law are opposed to it. While I agree that giving the government more control of the internet can be a scary proposition, companies like Nintendo, which was one of the first to publicly support the law, lose an insane amount of money due to piracy. I read a report that, worldwide, the videogame industry lost near $400 billion due to piracy in 2010. I am sure that number is inflated, but I am also sure that whatever the real number is, it's still absurdly massive. This report states that almost 10 million games were illegally downloaded in one moth alone. Fast. free, everyone. We feel entitled to have what we want when we want it, when it comes to the internet, and that sense of entitlement is expanding.
I do think cheating is more common and more acceptable now than it was 20 years ago. I think a big part of that is due to Napster. I don't mean that Napster is to blame for any perceived decline in morality among young people, I mean that it was the first thing to really capitalize on the best things about the internet: free, fast, everyone.
Napster would let you download any song you could find for free, of course. That means that everyone who put songs up to share and grabbed songs to listen to could get those songs in a fast, free manner. This is very different than the prior system, where I could only get songs from a friend. We both needed a blank tape or cd, and a system to record the music from one to the next, and had to actually possess the music already. That's not a system that is going to cripple the music industry. It wasn't fast, free, everyone. It was slow, a few bucks, and limited to my very small circle of friends.
Napster let me get all kinds of songs I wanted and didn't really want. But what's important is this: it never crossed my mind that it might be right or wrong. It just didn't. I was in high school, the songs were there for me to listen to and make mix-cd's with, and no one seemed to care.
This idea that everything should be free grew from that. I can watch movies on youtube, catch up on old shows in a million different places, and have all the information in the universe at my disposal. Fast, free, everyone. I believe that the freedom and ease of the internet has crept into many other realms of society, especially among young people. If test answers are available, they are probably fast, free and for everyone. If a video game can be downloaded, it too is fast and free. It's really hard to stop and think about the morality and ethics of things that come so easy and quickly.
Maybe this leads to the occupy movement at some level as well. I know that Occupy Your Town has a lot of different things they are complaining about, but one key sign that I see often is "bailout my student loans," or something to that effect. Why aren't there free, easy jobs for people to get? Why wasn't there free education? So much in life has been free up to this point, why does the system change so fast? The internet is a huge piece to this sense of entitlement that we see among 20-somethings and under, in my opinion.
Now the senate is considering a law that allows the government to shut down websites that violate copyright laws. Most of the fun, free stuff would go away, including tons of youtube videos, all torrenting/streaming sites that don't have rights to their content, and loads of other related sites. Most of my facebook friends that comment on this law are opposed to it. While I agree that giving the government more control of the internet can be a scary proposition, companies like Nintendo, which was one of the first to publicly support the law, lose an insane amount of money due to piracy. I read a report that, worldwide, the videogame industry lost near $400 billion due to piracy in 2010. I am sure that number is inflated, but I am also sure that whatever the real number is, it's still absurdly massive. This report states that almost 10 million games were illegally downloaded in one moth alone. Fast. free, everyone. We feel entitled to have what we want when we want it, when it comes to the internet, and that sense of entitlement is expanding.
No comments:
Post a Comment