Oftentimes, people in modern society do not truly appreciate the raw power granted to us by our inventions. This holds ever more true for computers and thereby laptops. We carry around these wonderful machines and take them for granted. The importance of such remarkable creations should not be undercut, as I hope to never do.
There are the obvious benefits of a word processor, namely the ease with which we can now create and edit long, complex documents; however, the limit of computers’ usefulness, of course, does not lie there, rather we gain the ability to do the previously unimaginable. There are simply unbelievable applications for computers that I feel only envy at not working with.
That being said, a task essential to any field of study is research. It matters not whether the aforementioned research is for an essay as simple as this one or serves as a basis for new hypotheses that may change everything, the byproduct of computers speaking with one another (i.e. the Internet) allows for innumerable amounts of information to be gathered and later viewed by anyone with access to the Internet.
For me in particular, it will allow me access to the meanings of very specific terms in German that evade the grasp of Google Translate or grant me the privilege of reading otherwise invisible papers discussing the elusive concept in question in enough detail that I can then create the term anew in English or vice versa. Furthermore, I can, through the masterpiece that is the computer, read ancient texts that would be otherwise non view-able by anyone but the highest ranked experts, such as the German Nibelungenlied, an epic poem discussing a dragon slayer and his vengeful wife. To be more specific, such works are, because of computers, available to people such as me in their original, both in text and in language.
However, rather oxymoronically, something helping someone in their studies is not always about facilitating their studying. If one cannot obtain a break from the books, that person will probably have a much harder time retaining the information or actually enjoying their life. In this respect, computers may be the most variable in their power. While they facilitate unbelievably difficult tasks, they also grant us down time. It is as the idiomatic expression goes: “work hard, play hard”. And what harder worker or harder player is there, if not the computer.
Acknowledgement: This essay was submitted by Isaac Herzberg, a student at University of Arizona, as part of application for 2017 rentipads.com Scholarship
