More On the Internet

Related: This one, and this one.

I was standing amidst a throng of high school students (that's an occupational hazard, as I work in a high school, and we often have throngs) and I noticed a student wearing a hoodie which was half black and half white ( https://www.zaful.com/contrast-patchwork-casual-hoodie-p_541938.html?currency=USD&lkid=615976&gclid=Cj0KCQiAtf_tBRDtARIsAIbAKe3XY9MFCGjsxZ5HqnVeeFZls8QJaemErsOb-Pr7jiYBMy_aVDhl0KoaAq1eEALw_wcB ). I was tempted to go up to him and ask him if he was being chased by someone with a a hoodie that was half white and half black. Funny, right?

I stopped myself, though, once I realized that there is no way that he would understand the reference. I could have said "You know...Star Trek? Frank Gorshin? Let that Be Your Last Battlefield?" but it wouldn't have triggered anything. For those of you currently befuddled, here. How is it that in this day and age of the internet, people seem to know so little?

Here's what I figured -- historically, the measure of wisdom hasn't been what a person knows, but what a person knows he doesn't know. There must be room for inquiry. Therefore, in a universe where all information is constantly available, everyone is, by default, an idiot. And welcome to our world! We NEED to have people with actual knowledge and experience because only they can see the gaps, because they appreciate their own limitations. In a world where everyone CAN know anything, no one actually has to know anything. Once we are complacent, thinking that we can find whatever we need, we lost the ability to anticipate our needs! Cultural knowledge, experiential knowledge, common sense all go out the window because we think that all the info is a Siri away. Do you remember that trip we went on and you took that pictuer of...? No, because all the pictures are uploaded and we can go through them. In fact, I don't have to remember that we went on the trip because the experience is not necessarily resident in my brain.

This is a problem. We stop walking through life asking questions when we know that the answers are already waiting. We aren't troubled by anything and nothing has to trigger any other ideas -- long term memory is dead because we can store all of our memories in the cloud. We don't know our family's phone numbers. We don't know our own history. We don't worry about the trivia and factoids which give life spice and put the random things we see into a context. If you know X, so when you write, comment or otherwaise create content, referencing X, I stand less chance of knowing X because there was no reason for me to know it. I need to be followed by an algorithm or a person who can see that (To be or not to be" is a thing which hearkens back to something else, and can express the use's significance to me. We are inventing a new profession, that of the context keeper, who specializes in knowing stuff without a computer and will be the one whose job it is to prompt us when there is a background that we should be made aware of.

There is a meme going around (meme being a unit of memory with a built in half life) which expands on an old saying (attributed to Miles Kington in Philip Sheldrake The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age, Chichester: Wiley, 2011, p.153): "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." The new (at least 4 years old) version adds in "philosophy is wondering if ketchup is a smoothie."

My understanding of it is "Facts are stored, knowledge is through access but wisdom is knowing what to access, and when, and how to access." Sure, it isn't smarmy but in about 2 months, very few people will know that it reflects Kington's earlier quote.