GRE essay: Access to information and lifelong learning

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Present your perspective on the issue below, "As societies all over the world have more and more access to new information, the effects on life-long learning can only be positive."

Over the past years, the access to information has become easier for an ever-increasing number of people spread all around the world. However, it is fallacious to say that this phenomenon has involved all societies, since it is widely know that there are some strains of them (namely those in the third world countries) in which also the access to potable water is not guaranteed, let alone the access to new information. Moreover, there are some countries in which living conditions are decidedly better, but dictatorial governments impose serious restriction over the information spread; a good example of this case is North Korea.

Having clarified this, we can agree that in most cases is true that information availability has many advantages. For example, the drop of television sets prices and the increased distribution of the proper infrastructures (such as emitters and repeaters) have clearly contributed to educate and culturally enrich many people. The simple possibility to watch the news or documentaries from home is something that was previously not possible and that usually benefits its users.
If we think about the internet and the marvellously great amount of information we may find, we have immediately another instance of the advantage that people now have: the number of website providing news or general information is uncountable! This has made the access to education far easier and cheaper: we no longer have to buy expensive encyclopaedias or books because it is enough to type in our favourite search engine the information we are looking for, to have at our disposal thousands and thousands of links to useful and, above all, free websites.

However, we must observe that it is merely superficial to claim that the effects of this average increased access to information on the population are always positive, since it is easy to think of many cases in point in which the effects are detrimental. When the sources of information increase, it becomes more and more difficult to check the validity and reliability of these sources. A clear example of this circumstance is what happened some years ago in Italy thanks to a famous TV show. This had advertised for many months a revolutionary treatment of neurodegenerative diseases which made use of stem cells and was conceived by a professor of..Italian literature. The strong advertisement of this kind of "information" (if we can still define it with this term) led many people with serious neurodegenerative diseases to abandon standard treatments and to try this “innovative” one. As you can imagine, no improvements stemmed from the usage of this magical remedy and the conditions of many people even worsened.

In conclusion, we can state that, even though the facilitated diffusion of information is generally very useful, this is not always true. In fact, when it happens that the widespread data is corrupted, serious by-products may be begot. If it were possible to verify the reliability of every source of information, this problem would not arise; nevertheless, since this is not realistically doable, all we can do is to take the new data we have with a grain of salt.

Thanks in advance.

jhucl