The Informational Advantage

Speed has become so important to modern society. The time it takes for information to travel in between two people via the internet has become negligible. Information about a bombing that happened on the other side of the world can be accessed by the average person within 30 minutes of its occurrence. The intro of chapter 1 in Academic Writing illustrated how media revolutions brought huge changes to the world, like the printing press. In the introduction, the internet is like the new printing press, and some argue that the internet signal “the democratization of literacy” (Rectenwald 2) and how knowledge is incredibly accessible to anyone. I have been reading the book Freakonomics that I think well explained the concept of information and how the internet has changed this society. For example, in terms of the business world, information that is withheld or hidden from the public can be used by businesses to take advantage of their customers. In the past, life insurance companies had taken advantage of the customers’ inability to compare other life insurance rates and jacked up their own prices. However, when the internet had rolled along and life insurance quote websites began popping up, the public was then able to compare and contrast life insurance plans to find the best one, hence dropping the life insurance rates dramatically. This is a primary example of how the internet has distributed information in a concise way so that the public is benefitted more. The democratization empowers the people to use new found information to their own benefit, and “the spread of the knowledge to the disadvantaged” helps create “a more equitable distribution of wealth” (Rectenwald 2). Even in the classroom, the internet has closed the informational gap between the teacher and the student. With laptops allowed in the classroom, the student has instant access to almost all of the knowledge of humanity at his or her fingertips, which could possibly explain why some teachers may not like laptops in the classroom, because the informational advantage that the teacher has over the student is significantly diminished. Though laptops and the internet may be a possible distraction for the student, they’re incredibly useful, allowing the student to clarify unknown terms during class and keeping pace with the lessons, as a result, the internet helps put an end to the knowledge disadvantage that the average person, like the student or a life insurance customer, has compared to the expert, like the teacher or the life insurance provider. The internet is simply a distributer, like the Robin Hood of information, that allows the knowledge-starved public to gain more of an advantage in their day-to-day lives and finances against the money-hungry companies that try to hide such information to exploit customers and maximize profits.