Homemade Is Bad

Nobody reads the paper anymore! In today’s age of social media and the internet, no one needs to read the paper anymore. We currently live in a society where most people find out important news via the internet, far before it is printed in papers, or strewn across the mainstream media news outlets. Today’s society is about staying informed, and trying to get that information as fast as possible. As Americans we are on the precipice of this ideal, we have more ways today to get information than ever before! We have so much information available that anything you could want to know is just a few searches away, to the point that you can make a homemade bomb or gun just by searching google, we have to much information available today and we need
With speeds often times over 10 megabits per second, you can find any information you want to in the blink of an eye. There is so much information available to us in fact, that much of this information is harmful and should not be so readily available. To that extent, the Boston Bombers used homemade devices, or IED’s, to kill dozens of people, and these were devices that they learned how to make from the internet. A British news website reports that “Thanks to the efforts of jihadist and anarchist groups, the basic instructions for assembling one of these crude devices are now freely available on the internet.” (Coughlin, 5). This article is consistent with stories we see all the time about explosives that shouldn’t be readily available information, yet is just a google search
In 2009 in Moldova, citizens took to the streets to protest a parliamentary election in which they knew was fraudulent. Malcolm Gladwell writes about this event in his article Small Change. “When ten thousand protestors took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest the country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which demonstrators were brought together.” (Gladwell, 248). This revolution is only one of many that have been spearheaded by efforts originating from social media, and the internet. A series of revolutions and political upheavals commonly referred to as the “Arab Spring” was perpetrated by many young citizens using Facebook and the internet to organize and rally in the streets. The “Arab Spring” was a cluster of simultaneous ousting’s of power in many north African and middle eastern country’s due to citizens being fed up with the status quo and secretly organizing through social media. In Egypt especially Facebook had a huge part of the revolution, so much so, that the government cut internet access in hope to stifle the revolution. Heather Brown, Emily Guskin, and Amy Mitchell write about this in their article titled “The Role of Social Media in the Arab Uprisings”. “Social media indeed played a part in the Arab uprisings.