Phillip Lenssen's The Allegory Of The Cave

According to the United Nations Agency, more than 3 billion people out of 7 billion around the world utilize the powers of the internet. With just a click of a button those 3 billion people can find an answer to any question they have. The amount of people who live on the world, or the amount of people who use the internet are just a couple of examples. It only takes Google an average of .30 seconds to retrieve answers from millions and millions of websites. However, the half a second search might require a person to spend hours looking for the most credible website out of the millions. Phillip Lenssen’s image accurately presents the idea that people cannot expect the initial results they receive from a search to be accurate or truthful, but …show more content…
Although the internet cannot be reliable at first glance, it can provide amazing information once a person can look past the advertisers or distractions and critical thinking is applied. In Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave, three prisoners have been tied up in a cave, facing a wall since birth only able to see the shadows reflected from a fire behind them. As a result, they believed that the shapes of darkness is reality since it is the only thing they have been exposed to. Socrates uses this story to explain to a student that people are blinded by what they think is the truth, but it could in fact be an illusion. In this case, the unreliable websites and information on the internet is the illusion. One day, one of the prisoners is freed and slowly makes his way out of the cave and he follows the light to the outside and realizes that there is so much more to the world than just shapes and shadows. People need to find there “light” and begin to dig deeper if they want to find out the truth by researching on the internet. Unlike some researchers who believe that internet is altering the way people think, critical thinking skills can be applied when searching for credible information. As Plato said, what you first see is not true and one can be exposed to some other enlightened thought or idea once you decide to stray away from the crowd. One way to distinguish what is credible from what isn’t, is to use critical thinking

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Phillip Lenssen's The Allegory The Cave