Since entering high school years ago the internet has had a big impact on my academic career. From watching math tutor videos on youtube or looking up definitions on dictionary.com, the internet has made books almost obsolete in my eyes. I see now that when I take up a book and attempt to read it, I find I have a lack of concentration and remembrance of what I had just read and so I end up rereading it. Compared to the internet which gives you the information you seek right in front of you, when using books you have to dissect the information to find what you are looking for. This ability I find to be hard for  many people today and almost every time they would rather search something on the internet instead of looking for it manually in a book. For me and other students reading books has almost become obsolete with the the availability of written summaries online of  any book you can think of. I find that a connection made through reading a novel is lost when i use the internet to look up a summary of certain chapters because I did not want to read the book. I personally do not use social media all that often compared to other students my age because I prefer to talk to people face to face. So my writing skills and collaboration skills through the internet have not really been affected other than me using the internet for writing papers. I find that many people today do not think before they act, or really think at all for that matter. The lack of common sense in people my age today is astounding and I believe that the increased reliability on the internet has to do with it.

Thompson makes many great claims in his text about how the internet has increased cooperation between working professionals and how writing for an audience will propel students to write with more creativity and logic. The connections made by these working professionals will result in new inventions or new partnerships between industries but the connections made by everyday people are on twitter or facebook and not advancing society in any direction. One the experiments thompson noted in his text was done by a Stanford English professor, Andrea Lunsford, and over the course of five years she collected nearly fifteen thousand pieces of writing from 189 students whether it was from social media or for classes. She concluded that 40 percent of everything they wrote was pleasure and that, “They’re writing so much more than students before them ever did… It’s stunning” (Thompson 51). This study was based off of students that go to one of the most prestigious academic schools in the world. Their writing capabilities are arguably more profound than that of the regular person. When the internet is used by someone who is capable of connecting beyond the social standpoint and uses the internet as one of their many tools than this resource is a great one. Sadly most people cannot do this. Time and time again the internet has become a distraction for many students in class and outside of the classroom. The lack of effort given in the classroom today has in part come from the advancement of the internet.