ISSUE150 【CSMY作文互改小组】 第七次作业

stevenhuUID: 172722

TOPIC: ISSUE150 - "Because of television and worldwide computer connections, people can now become familiar with a great many places that they have never visited. As a result, tourism will soon become obsolete."
WORDS: 551          TIME: 0:49:46          DATE: 2007-1-24

I generally agree with the speaker's first claim that the popular of television and computer connection enable people to be familiar with a bunch of places they have never been before. But I don't agree with the speaker's attitude that it diminishes the necessary of real tourism, since the above media types are not capable of conveying all the information led by tourism. My conclusion is based on the following analysis.

Admittedly, because the widely popularity of televisions and internet, people became more familiar with many areas they have never been before. Usually, these types of media can provide much more information than traditional text books and radio. So, staying at home, people can watch lots of general introduction as well as special investigation of many famous sites, with both moving graphics and necessary explanations of the screen. Scientists have proved that multimode information can greatly improve people's impression of the conveying context, which means the receiver can assimilate the content at a much higher efficiency compared with only using one mode. Thus, accumulating day by day, people nowadays can really learn a great amount of knowledge from the above media, including the introduction and remark of the places they have never been before.

However, even thought the mentioned multimode media can help people memorize information conveyed with a dramatic efficiency, it still fails at sending certain types of messages due to its own limitation. From the theory of multimedia technology, we learned that besides the widely used modes like seeing and listening, people still have many other channels that can receive or sense information from the outer world, such as smell, touch, and so on. So far as I know, there is still no commercially released television or certain type of personal computer that are equipped with the ability to provided the sense of smell and touch. Even in the part of seeing, commodity televisions and personal computers fail to provide users with stereo graphics, through which we can receive distance information like we are seeing real objects. Therefore, despite they are very popular and easy to use, they can not provide sufficient information as real sites.

Apart from the technological aspects, the contents of television program and computer contexts are inevitable mixed with certain type of the author's attitude, which greatly influence the receiver's impression to the sites. Just have a look at the different impressions of the United States among the people in different countries.  British’s, like lots of people in other countries, by watching televisions and learning history, consider America  as the world's most developed country and the ideal place for freedom and independent. However, also by watching televisions and learning history, people in North Korea believe it is the most evil country in the world , and people there are really leading a hard life. Because the information conveyed by these medias are simply selected by the author’s attitude and aim, they can easily distort people's impression.

From the above discussion, modern medias indeed can usually inform people with great knowledge about many famous sites, but they can not supply the authentic and enough information as the real site. So, through media, even people can now become quite acquainting with the places they've never been before, it can still not replace the necessity of tourism.