Not all knowledge is on the intertubes

[MadHound]

I ran across an ad for a computer program that is designed to help students study. The product itself would seem to be actually quite handy for many students. But what burned me is that the ad heavily implied that all the knowledge worth knowing or caring about is on the web, and that you don't need to pay attention to any other source of knowledge.

I see this attitude here, and elsewhere as well. If you are quoting from a book or manuscript that is in print but not on the web, well you might as well be simply making up stuff as far as some are concerned. If you base your knowledge on books and printed material, but can't link to it on the web, well you knowledge is invalid.

Kindle and e-readers are accelerating this trend of making all knowledge that is somehow "worthwhile" into an electronic format, and anything that isn't in an electronic format is deemed "worthless".

The fact of the matter is that the vast bulk of our knowledge base still resides on paper. As a historian I know that there are vast untapped stores of knowledge that will never make it into electronic form because they are so obscure and esoteric (a similar culling is going on in music and audio recording as it is digitized). Yet they are important, even vital, nonetheless.

This increasing wikiation of our knowledge base is frightening. It allows for massive control of our knowledge base, along with manipulation of data and facts. Yes, I know, a few years back they came out and said that Wikipedia is as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Personally, I don't find that too terribly reassuring, neither do most serious scholars I know. Encyclopedias and Wiki's may not get their facts wrong(though sometimes they do) but they commit the error of omission on virtually every single page. Furthermore, their lack of insight and analysis of particular events and such is horrifying. Yet in college, around here, Wiki is considered to be a legit source. How very sad.

No real point to this post, other than to bring this to your attention, namely if we continue down this path we're going to enter another intellectual dark age, where what you know and how well you know it is going to be controlled by those same corporations that want to control the rest of your life. Is this what you want? If not, fight to keep the preserves of printed knowledge alive and vital in your community.

[el_bryanto]

1. Along with that you have people who have soundbite understandings of issues

they haven't grasped the complexity of the issue, haven't actually grappled with what their opponents believe. You see that in the Cordoba Center issue; it's easier to label your opponents bigots (which in some cases, to be fair, they are) than it is to actually look at what they are saying.

It's easier to have a simplistic soundbite understand of any issue than it is to see it from all sides.

Bryant

[MadHound]

2. True that, but that has been around with us for a long while,

I find it far more disturbing that people aren't willing to extend their knowledge base to anything that isn't on the web. Considering that, by its very nature, the web contains very little, if any sources of primary knowledge, it is amazingly easy to manipulate and limit these people's knowledge base.

[Buns_of_Fire]

3. The Atlantic had a related article a few years ago...

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Where, in real life, I used to dismiss tiresome disagreements with "look it up," I find I'm now dismissing them with "Google it." Knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep...

[MadHound]

4. I've found it really quite frustrating

Holding debates with people whose knowledge source is only what's on the 'net. You quote them something from a book or primary source and they think you're ignorant. Where do these people think that knowledge on the net comes from? Oh, yeah, printed primary sources.