Our current era is commonly referred to as the “age of information.” I think this nomenclature highlights something important through what it doesn’t say: we don’t call it the age of knowledge. Despite an abundance of information, we do not necessarily know more. Besides, we are also inundated with mis- and disinformation which might actually be making us know less.
Although you can easily Google something in seconds, it’s hard to retain what you learn. I realized recently that I don’t remember what I’ve googled in the past week, let alone what the answers to those queries were, yet I still recall bits and pieces of things I learned from books as a small child. More importantly, all of the facts and knowledge I can recite off the top of my head are things I learned either from books, movies, school, or other people. Knowledge from Google doesn’t stick.
When I was a small child and I wasn’t yet exposed to the internet, I consumed a lot of nonfiction media. I watched nature documentaries, I read probably every book my local library had to offer on dinosaurs and I learned about the Mars rovers, the ocean, et cetera. I was definitely one of those kids, but looking back on those days, I almost feel like I knew more than I do now.
As I was reflecting on this, I also realized how much knowledge I absorbed through osmosis just by living in the world. In 2016, I was seven years old, yet I remember slowly learning about the events of the presidential election and gaining a basic understanding of how our politics work just through hearing my parents talking about it day to day. At an even younger age, I slowly learned about different sports and how TV worked through sitting with my dad while he watched hockey or football. I began to grasp the concepts of acting and special effects in film through watching Star Trek with my mom.
It wasn’t just specific topics; I was piecing together how the world worked. People often claim that a huge benefit of the internet is that it can give people this kind of knowledge of how things work and how current events are transpiring. But I remember, albeit just barely, the last vestiges of the heyday of newspapers, television, radio news, and all the other ways we already had to communicate with each other that equally accomplished that. I’m not saying this to diss on the internet or to say those days were inherently better, but I think we’ve forgotten that we were able to obtain information and facts without it.
In addition, I feel like I used to actually know what I knew. That’s a nonsensical sentence, but bear with me. First, I knew exactly how I learned things, and I could usually pinpoint an exact source. I knew what I read in that specific dinosaur encyclopedia; I knew how to pronounce that Irish name because my dad told me; I knew that I learned how to make toast because my mom showed me.
Second, I knew only these things that I had either figured out experientially or researched. The things I was learning, or holding in my brain in some capacity, like stories or dreams, were not muddled. In contradiction, most of the facts I know today, and even my own ideas and memories, are interspersed with the loud, blank spaces formed by the multitudes of other random content I have scrolled through online or watched to pass time.
Third, every piece of knowledge was more deeply ingrained. The process of learning was by no means labor-intensive, but it certainly took time, and the knowledge was obtained through a much deeper interaction with the source material. Obviously, reading a whole book on something will make it stick a lot more than a five-second search.
What I’m building up to here is that I felt like this knowledge was truly mine. If I was talking at length about something I knew a lot about, I had learned in a way where I had actually formed my own knowledge on the subject and could, as we were sometimes asked to in school, “use my own words” to describe what I knew. While I can still do this with some topics, with many others, I find myself simply regurgitating what was said in the last video essay I watched about the topic. I cannot find the root of the knowledge, because for as thought provoking and informative as video essays can be, I did not do the learning.
There are so many ways that we as a society have forgotten how to trust ourselves and each other, and this is one of them. We no longer trust in what we can learn and truly know for ourselves through the pre-internet ways and just through being alive. I knew so much when I was younger without ever touching a computer, and the only difference that me being online has made is that I know more now about online things specifically.
Just because we have information so readily available through the world wide web, we shouldn’t forget that we are capable of knowing things by ourselves. Although it feels unnecessary to know when Google or ChatGPT or a rando on the internet can know for you, I believe it’s important to know at least some things for yourself and in a deeper way. If we don’t know anything for ourselves and are dependent on the web to answer our every question, solve our problems, make everything convenient, and accept what it feeds us as fact, we make for a more easily manipulated population, and under no circumstances is that a good thing.