The Knowledge-Baseless Society
I always feel privileged to have lived through such an interesting period. It began with the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War, the death of Che Guevara and the launch of the Magical Mystery Tour, the unveiling of the Concorde supersonic jet and the discovery of the lost city of Thera. It was the Summer of Love that year.
I also lived through a time of punchcards as a programming mode, tape drives as main storage, crude mathematical programming that launched the Apollos into space. And when I was growing up, all the information in a library was either in the huge heavy volumes of the Britannica's Propaedia, Micropaedia and Macropaedia, or in 3" x 5" index cards in little steel cabinets from which you found books on shelves.
It was a time in which knowledge was ubiquitous but not easy to access. From Gutenberg's time, knowledge had been less ubiquitous and even harder to access. But I was born at the dawn of the microcomputer age.
In the four decades (and some) since then, I've realised that things have changed a lot on the information front. Young people have often been fobbed off (or allowed themselves to be deluded by) the idea that since knowledge is so readily available, you need only look for it when you know you need it. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of people don't bother to stock up on it 'just in case'. The raven mind which sought juicy bits to devour and digest gave way to the magpie mind which kept the shiny trinkets for display; the magpie mind has given way to the peacock mind which displays its own stuff but can't be bothered to look for other stuff unless peculiarly moved.
In a sense, information is still accreted, if you think of information in the IS sense of ordered data. In quite another sense, there is far too much non-information — stuff that will never lead to effective praxis and growth. It's quite possible, and in fact probable, that many people hold a view different from (or to, depending on the direction) this. But let me tell you what I have seen.
In Atlantis, I have had the privilege to work with many bright people, the heirs of the bright people of the same institution in ages past. In the old days, those bright people dug up their own information and poked and probed at the fabric of knowledge. Some bright people made things and found hacks through the wall of reality. These kinds of bright people are fewer now. If you ask them a question, the response is not one of 'let me find the answer' but one of 'how the hell would I know'. In an age of Wikipedia and Google, it is appalling how much slower the average student is at digging up facts than my father, who still uses a physical library.
Modern society has been touted as knowledge-based. It isn't really so. It seems more disinformation-based, dysfunction-based, category-based but using false and fishy categories. It is a knowledge-baseless society, save for the sub-societies in which knowledge structures are carefully built and examined for cracks and holes. The centre cannot hold; this was true long ago. But what is left?
I also lived through a time of punchcards as a programming mode, tape drives as main storage, crude mathematical programming that launched the Apollos into space. And when I was growing up, all the information in a library was either in the huge heavy volumes of the Britannica's Propaedia, Micropaedia and Macropaedia, or in 3" x 5" index cards in little steel cabinets from which you found books on shelves.
It was a time in which knowledge was ubiquitous but not easy to access. From Gutenberg's time, knowledge had been less ubiquitous and even harder to access. But I was born at the dawn of the microcomputer age.
In the four decades (and some) since then, I've realised that things have changed a lot on the information front. Young people have often been fobbed off (or allowed themselves to be deluded by) the idea that since knowledge is so readily available, you need only look for it when you know you need it. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of people don't bother to stock up on it 'just in case'. The raven mind which sought juicy bits to devour and digest gave way to the magpie mind which kept the shiny trinkets for display; the magpie mind has given way to the peacock mind which displays its own stuff but can't be bothered to look for other stuff unless peculiarly moved.
In a sense, information is still accreted, if you think of information in the IS sense of ordered data. In quite another sense, there is far too much non-information — stuff that will never lead to effective praxis and growth. It's quite possible, and in fact probable, that many people hold a view different from (or to, depending on the direction) this. But let me tell you what I have seen.
In Atlantis, I have had the privilege to work with many bright people, the heirs of the bright people of the same institution in ages past. In the old days, those bright people dug up their own information and poked and probed at the fabric of knowledge. Some bright people made things and found hacks through the wall of reality. These kinds of bright people are fewer now. If you ask them a question, the response is not one of 'let me find the answer' but one of 'how the hell would I know'. In an age of Wikipedia and Google, it is appalling how much slower the average student is at digging up facts than my father, who still uses a physical library.
Modern society has been touted as knowledge-based. It isn't really so. It seems more disinformation-based, dysfunction-based, category-based but using false and fishy categories. It is a knowledge-baseless society, save for the sub-societies in which knowledge structures are carefully built and examined for cracks and holes. The centre cannot hold; this was true long ago. But what is left?
Labels: Information, Knowledge, Society
etched with acid at 1:37:00 pm
2 Comments:
Actually, it shouldn't be too surprising, should it? Access latency has gone way down, but the quality of information that is instantly accessible is not particularly good. It won't be surprising that the student is slower when he's trawling through all the wrong places for information.
The motto for SomethingAwful.com comes to mind.
LR: you're being silly. The quality of the required information is the same. It's just that the average quality has dropped because a lot of the information has no quality for academic purposes at all. What sucks is that students are actually worse at retrieving information than they were before even though it's easier.
Post a Comment
<< Home