Here is a rant I’ve been wanting to write for quite a while and today I’ve decided to stick it on the blog and see if it makes any sense.
We may have much more digital tools available to our fingertips these days but are we more knowledgeable? I am not talking about the whole ‘Google making us stupid’ thing here, I am talking about finding genuine and interesting content that could make us more knowledgeable.
The more the Internet is growing the more difficulties we have to find new and interesting content. Google ranking works in such ways that it is now very hard to look for information beyond Wikipedia for instance. I have nothing against Wikipedia, it is an amazing and very reliable way to look for information however it is only one way to look for knowledge.
By creating hubs like Wikipedia and RSS feeds, we are easing the process of looking for information but we are to a certain extend creating an illusion of knowledge. Looking for a Wikipedia entry isn’t enough, it is only giving you some surface knowledge.
This is quite paradoxical for a planner but I am now operating in a vacuum online. I have spent so much time building my Netvibes page over the years that I am now doing 80% of my browsing on it. It is becoming increasingly difficult to fight against laziness and browse beyond the RSS feed.
To fight against my digital routine I try to post one interesting link/idea a day on my Twitter. Most of the time I try not to use any content from my Netvibes to post these links and it hasn’t been an easy task so far.
Balance between efficiency and discovery, that’s what it is all about!
[Pic via]
There’s a (seemingly) great exhibition in the Netherlands that touches upon the same subject: http://www.montevideo.nl/en/agenda/detail_agenda.php?id=326&archief=
there was a post by gareth kay refuting how the web is killing knowledge, how there are many serendipitous findings as we go from link to link, page to page.
we’ve always had an illusion of knowledge, the more expert we become in a field, the more we question what our assumptions and beliefs are. yes wikipedia can pass a “true” knowledge, and there are certainly deeper and more nuanced ways and forms to arrive at knowledge, but the illusion of knowledge will remain for complex systems, because we erroneously grapple with arriving at certainty. in communications there really is no such thing.
the web is making us smarter, but in a different way. we can lament where did culture go, there was a time when being a great writer was a crowning cultural achievement, now we celebrate film directors in that type of way. and yes we’ve become more bite-sized cultural nibbles, rather than multi-course meals, but we have the option if we care to. do we feel we are better informed, while actually being less informed, i’m sure that’s the case for most of us. but then again that just may be the human spirits natural tendency towards self-aggrandizement.
what we may be doing is storing less knowledge at the ready, just like we remember less phone numbers because we have cell phones, but we have more cell phone numbers. same thing with knowledge, we don’t remember things right away, but we can look it up in a few seconds.
hopefully this makes sense