journal 11.5

Some media scholars say that Internet makes people shallow. I turned up my nose at this opinion, because I think Internet is just another form of media and the content doesn't change at all. However, what I saw today makes me rethink this issue.

A few days ago, a famous Chinese scientist passed away. He had made great contribution to the space engineering of China. Today is his farewell ceremony. Renren.com, which is very similar to Facebook.com and enjoys great popularity among students in the mainland of China, has added a webpage on its website. The users can post some words that they want to say on the page. Up to now , there are more than 200 thousand messages on that page.

Here comes the point. Is this act enough to memory the scientist? Students log on to Renren.com and find there is a website. They just incidentally input some characters and this is it. They might feel that I did something and I was aware of that. After doing that, they just do what they want to do with a quiet conscience.

I think this is kind of pathetic. Is the great scientist only worth some keyboard percussions? The design of the memory webpage just simplified the memoriam activity. It became more entertaining and less serious. We lost the solemn and respectful sense and the whole procession is just like a mere formality.

Who should be responsible for this? The webmaster or the users? Neither of them is false. I think it's the Internet should be blamed. Just like I said at the beginning, Internet makes people shallow. The form of Internet decides what people would do in the Internet. McLuhan had said the medium is the message. It seems that his theory was proved once again.