Consider the following comments on the internet.
We built a library of everything and then forgot how to tell the shelves apart.
The internet gave everyone a voice and then sold the loudest ones to the highest bidder.
Connection without attention is just a crowd that cannot hear itself.
The web promised to make us free, but freedom and a feed are not the same thing.
Never before have so many been so informed and so certain of so little.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that the internet did not simply expand access to information but rewired the incentives that govern attention, and those incentives now shape what we believe is true. Open by honouring the genuine democratisation, that a teenager in a remote town can now reach knowledge once locked behind walls and wealth. Then complicate it: the same architecture that frees speech also rewards outrage over accuracy, because engagement, not truth, is what the system is built to harvest. A strong third move resists blaming the technology alone, since the platforms only amplify appetites that were human long before they were digital. Caution: avoid the easy nostalgia for a pre-internet age that was quieter mainly because most people were never allowed to be heard at all.