A series of unrelated articles I read this week prompted me to some reflection. The articles - "I used to Be a Human Being", "Does knowledge matter in the age of Google", and "Why you feel busy all the time (when you're actually not)".
For me, they all speak generally to a common theme that I come back to you again and again in my thoughts and my occasional writing - the impact of the digital age we live in on how we think, act, and understand ourselves.
As the article speaking about the increasing irrelevance of knowledge in today's world discusses, what we know without having to look up (and by corollary, what we don't know) impacts how we think and understand things about our world - from religion and politics to economics and sociology. So, when people state that they don't need to know what the largest ocean is, or the significance of the Magna Carta or Sputnik, its not just a matter of expressing their ignorance on subjects they deem trivial. Rather, it is that they suggest that ignorance itself is trivial, because its always a Google search away from being eliminated.
The problem though, particular due to the reliance on the Internet, is that because there is a decreasing respect for so called "trivial" knowledge, there is a decreasing respect for the discipline to obtain knowledge. As a result, we have less ability to discern the difference between knowledge, and mere information. After all, "I read it on the Internet, so it must be true" is a real thing people do. The example that keeps crossing my head is that most people may see my History degree as useless. They don't need to know the history I know, because they can quickly search the Internet and get the same information. But because they trivialize the knowledge, they don't appreciate the manner in which the knowledge was obtained. Because, as studying history teaches a person, not all sources of information are of equal value or equal credibility. The study of History is not just learning about a multitude of facts from the past, its about understanding the mechanisms we use to know what information about the past are facts, and what is questionable; primary source documentation versus secondary or even tertiary source documentation; the credibility and authenticity of the source. Thus, a History degree teaches that not all sources of information on the Internet are equal. But, if you view all the knowledge as trivial, its easier to view the process of acquiring that knowledge as trivial as well.
To be fair, its probably harder to discern knowledge from mere information in today's world, with the constant onslaught of information we face everyday. The other two articles linked above make this point. We have become, in a sense, processers of information without regard to discernment of accuracy or credibility, because to engage in such discernment would result in being left behind. So we craft feeds to provide the information to us, and naturally believe that it gives us knowledge about the world around us, and believe it to be accurate.
This leads to all sorts of issues - people reading random blogs and believing that climate change science is a vast global conspiracy among scientists (against the poor, defenseless fossil fuel corporations, no less; anti-vaxxers finding reinforcement of their unfounded belief, leading to confirmation bias and increase dangers from diseases to all peoples; to increased and more intense partisanship in politics, due to the ease of finding echo chambers.
It also leads to the feeling of being constantly overwhelmed. We can't keep up with all the information that is being thrown at us, and so we have to make a multitude of decisions that wears down our cognitive capacity in a given time frame. As a result, we feel stressed and busy - we have to keep checking feeds and updating our own feeds. And, because the digital age means one is available and accessible all the time (with the cloud, you can access your work from anywhere), there is no escaping those pressures and obligations and decisions as well. We view text messages as a way to avoid phone calls, but expect immediate responses. We do business emails 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The hum is constant, and getting louder and louder.
I know this is a long, rambling post, but as I stated at the beginning, I keep thinking about how this digital age impacts us, our understanding of self, and our understanding of our world. It seems to me that we've begun to lose an appreciation for the discipline to acquire knowledge. We've begun to lose an appreciation for physical world contact, as opposed to the mere digital. We've begun to lose an appreciation for the mindfulness of reflection.
And I do wonder, at what point do we start to change the very nature of what it means to be human? At what point, do we permanently forsake the physical world, for the digital?
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