You May Now Disregard the Bride

I've recently noticed a disturbing trend amongst the general public that has taken over may aspects of society and popular culture in the past few years. This is trend seems simply to be a change in our relationship to information. Information has changed a lot in the past few years, mostly that now there is 1. much more of it, and 2. it is everywhere. Just 100 years ago, an average person probably saw not more than 50 books in their life, let alone read them. These days, a single shelf of a single floor of a single library in a single town of a single state is likely to contain more literature than most people will read in their lifetimes. A person could spend the rest of their life understanding the market data from the last hour of stock exchanges and probably never finish. Availability of information is in no way a problem for anyone in a developed nation. 

Why then are people more ignorant than ever? If information is everywhere, why is so much of it being ignored or discounted? I believe that our relationship to information has changed because we no longer have to earn it. This is what I mean: growing up, I had an encyclopedia set in my house. Well, two actually- One was a children's edition. Whenever I wanted to find a specific piece of knowledge, I had to get on a stool, pull down a heavy book of a high shelf, and flip through it, floundering with my third grade spelling skills until I got to the one entry that I wanted. If there was a word or an idea in there that I didn't understand, I had to look that up in a dictionary or the encyclopedia too. This laborious process of acquisition of knowledge is a mere triviality compared to how information was sought after historically, but I think it serves as an apt example for the relationship to knowledge that people used to have. We used to have to labor actually exert effort to find what it is I wanted to know. 

Now, the internet has more articles and entries than anyone could begin to compute, so we rely on google to tell me which ones are the most reliable or important. This is a fundamental change. Because people no longer have to work at it, they am much more likely to discount the information that I do find, simply because they unconsciously think that the lack of effort which which they found this information is the same as the lack of effort someone put into getting it there. Now in come cases, this happens to be true. Anyone can start a blog or write something about a a topic they know nothing about, and indeed, a significant portion of the internet is false, or at best misguided truth. However, this becomes dangerous when we take this attitude toward genuine resources of knowledge, such as the work of scientists or historians, i.e. people that actually know something about something. For them, the labour of the 20 page article you just read isn't in the writing of twenty pages, which would be the equivalent of the labour you put into attain the knowledge, it was the hours and hours of research and thinking and being very wrong so they could find out how to be a little right. It was the frantic grant applications and the long nights of slaving away at a fragment of codex or a pipette and microscope. That is what we are discounting when we don't take seriously their work. 

We used to be married to our information, and had to work and learn to love what we learned, even if what we found wasn't what we wanted. And some people still are in such a way married, and they are in no way the people I am addressing here. I'm addressing the Mitch McConnells and the Ragen Chastains of this world. Information is not just words, any more than music is just noise. If you're not a scientist, that's okay. Listen to one. If you're not a doctor, that's fine. Listen to one. There is an, for all intents and purposes, infinite supply of information in this world. If you choose to be dumb, that is by all means your right. But don't try to pass your stupidity off for anything else except what it is.