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