Summary Of Kids Today By Amy Goldwasser

The Internet is America’s Villain Amy Goldwasser in her essay, “What’s the Matter with Kids Today?” challenges the idea that “kids today” don’t read or write. She argues that an average of 16.7 hours is spent a week in the average teen’s life reading and writing online. However, there are educational and social forms of reading and writing that kids do online also. Contrary to Goldwasser’s opinion and her call to action to stop regarding the Internet as a villain, I would argue that the Internet and cell phones are indeed what is wrong with kids today. It is agreeable that the Internet serves two purposes for kids today: educational research tool and social media networking. In order to refute Amy Goldwasser’s stance, evidence will be discussed
in three topics: educational internet use, social media internet use, and cell phone use. It is undeniable that the Internet is an infinite resource of information.
You can research anything in the world you could possibly think of and want to. Educational at best, the Internet is the world’s major source of instantaneous information at your fingertips. But the huge downfall to everybody having this resource and now so adopted by almost the entire population as a way of life (i.e. banking, email, bill paying, etc.) is that anyone can find out anything about anybody at any time so privacy is an issue. The Internet has become a necessity of life because most people can’t even go a few hours let alone a day without being on the internet. You cannot even go to a job site today and ask for an application to fill out because they send you to a kiosk computer in the store or give you a website you can visit in order to electronically file your employment application. The Internet is light years past a mere educational
resource. Kids today spend an average 16.7 hours a week online but most of this is not a forced labor like researching to write a paper. In fact, most of the time kids spend online is voluntary and spent surfing the web and checking in on social media websites like facebook and myspace are just a few social sites out there today. Kids can communicate with each other at all times and anywhere in the world with the internet. Kids have fallen into an era of text talk due to all the instant messaging and texting fads. The media only adds to this spiraling black hole. Every TV show you see promotes their website, Facebook account, Twitter hash tag, email, or special text messaging code. The fact that kids are talking on facebook, myspace and emailing all the time makes their spelling ability bad because of the auto correct systems on the computer that will correct a word for you. Kids no longer have to look up a word in the dictionary to see how it is correctly spelled and get the right meaning of the word.
Now even gaming consoles are online for all the kids to play instead of going outside to play with other children to get some fresh air. Most of the games kids are playing are war games like “Call of Duty” is a favorite among most kids today and that game is very violent in nature. This accounts to kids being more overweight then the kids prior to the internet being used for online gaming purposes because they don’t get outside to exercise. But on the same side there are educational games out there but most kids would rather spend their time playing the non-educational games. Books are even now available to download online to a tablet or computer so now more and more people aren’t even reading hard cover books when they can just use the internet to download them. No wonder kids are ultimately corrupted by the Internet. They don’t even know what the Dewey Decimal system is anymore! Cell phones are a monster all in their own.
Cell phones create the feeling that anyone can get a hold of you at any time and at anyplace. Nobody owns a landline much anymore because of the ease of using a cell phone. To be quite frank nobody really speaks to one another much anymore. People today would prefer to text message or connect on the Internet to speak with each other. So peoples social skills are reduced to just texting over a phone instead of actually speaking with one another. When is the last time you saw a fifty cent pay phone? I think that classifies as an antique now! Smartphones are cell phones that incorporate the Internet and Applications of Internet related websites into the basic talk and text messaging of a cell phone. The wave of texting has caused many more car accident when driving and is against the law in many states while driving for that reason. All types of apps for a peoples phones now in days makes people rely to much on the internet if the internet went down how would they survive? Now people can access anything they want right at the palm of their hand at any
time! Now people can stream movies on their computers and other devices causing social interaction of actually going to the movie theater mostly obsolete. People would rather stay home and watch movies in their own home then go to the local movie theater for a movie night. This causes people to not even leave there own home anymore to interact with other human beings in person because you can use the internet for anything. It is evident that the internet is in fact the villain of today’s young crowd. No matter how educational one may feel the internet is all that educational information came from a book. The Internet has many other evils like hackers that can get into your bank account, take your money and viruses that will destroy your computer. The main cause of the Internet’s detriment to society is the overload of social media networking and human life’s reliance on the Internet to survive in America.

Works Cited
Goldwasser, Amy. “What’s the Matter with Kids Today?” The Norton Field Guide to Writing. 2nd ed. 2010. Print.
Hrastinski, Stefan, and M. Aghaee Naghmeh. "How are Campus Students using Social Media to Support their Studies? an Explorative Interview Study." Education and Information Technologies 17.4 (2012): 451-64. ProQuest Central. Web. 26 Oct. 2012.
Herrera, Linda. "Youth and Citizenship in the Digital Age: A View from Egypt." Harvard Educational Review 82.3 (2012): 333,352,438. ProQuest Central. Web. 26 Oct. 2012.