I grew up thinking I was a pretty smart guy. I was not always the smartest person in the room. In fact, I went to a high school where the smartest people in the state were basically trying just to be the smartest person in the room at that time. I held my own for the most part. I relied heavily on critical thinking as well as a great deal of reading in order to have a substantive base of knowledge, which allowed me the range I needed to have these conversations and work on the difficult problems we approached.
Uncoded: I knew a little bit about a lot, because I busted my butt to make sure I did.
As I look back on those years I feel like I went to school at the very end of ‘old school understanding’. I navigated the commercial birth of the internet in a time before google. I went to college when Inter-library loan was still extremely relevant, because there were books out there that people needed to physically hold in order to absorb knowledge). This is where my kids would chime in with, “Okay boomer.” And justifiably so. It is such that I was born into a world that is terribly different from the one I live in–so much so that knowledge, as it were, is less recognizable.
Google did not so much kill knowledge as make it bourgeoisie. See, anyone can google and presume they know a little bit about a lot. In truth people assume they know everything about a lot and that I believe is the real difference and dissasocciation when it comes to knowledge. I say this because modern ‘knowledge’ exists both out of context and disconnected from any real understanding. People look up facts, follow the steps of videos, and presume that being able to follow orders means you understand what it is you are following. In fact they don’t. It is the fundamental difference between reading the instructions to put together Ikea furniture, and knowing why the lock points are exactly where they are.
The problem is that nobody actually cares anymore. Knowledge has been changed into the ability to pass a state test and successfully locate the answers for stuff on google. I do not feel this bodes well for our society. It births fewer and fewer readers and thinkers. As a result we are a nation in the situation that we are in right now.
And it is only going to get worse.