» Columns

» Features

- Join Here
- Terms & Conditions
- What is Writers Club?

It’s long been said that 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing', but we're in need of a new cliché for these shiny modern times. Something like: "Too much information makes you stupid" perhaps?

Back in primary school (this was shortly after Krakatoa), I was forced to write a report on pre-historic man, focusing on the society known as the Cro-Magnons. I, naturally, left the assignment until the last possible moment, and to this day I can remember the spiraling panic I experienced on that Sunday afternoon when I discovered that nobody knew anything whatsoever about Cro-Magnons. Even my father – infallible source of all knowledge up to that point – gave me a puzzled look that plainly said: “Crow what?”

I searched through every reference book we had in the house (and all the neighbour’s houses, too) and the best I could come up with was that the Cro-Magnons were regarded as the ancestors of modern humans, and that their remains had been found in some dingy cave in France.

I cursed and spat. Thanks a lot, Encyclopaedia Britannica. That just wasn’t going to hack it with the fearsome Miss Whitley, supreme Uber-teacher of Class 3W. To cut a long and tragic story short, I got an F for my report and a full two minutes of her legendary Withering Stare. The odd thing is that I can still remember every one of the few facts I managed to wrench from those uncooperative books.

Now I put myself into the smelly converse takkies of one of today’s school kids. I type ‘Cro-Magnon’ into the Google search-engine and… 0.48 seconds later I’m looking at the first of 42 600 results.

Forty two thousand six hundred matches! Okay, admittedly some of them will be links to fur-and-club-themed porn sites and others will lead to Ally McBeal fanzines, but there are still thousands of sites out there offering everything I could ever want to know about the subject that stumped my entire neighborhood in the pre-internet age. Give me an hour and I could cut and paste together a university-level treatise on our cave-dwelling ancestors, complete with timelines, genealogical trees and lots of pretty pictures.

Is this a good thing, or what?

There are advantages to such effortless access to information, of course. Used properly, the vast repository of facts out there on the web can enrich our lives and add to our understanding of the world we live in. But, inevitably, there’s a dark side too.

Students today wouldn’t even have to go to the effort of cutting and pasting other people’s work into a semi-legible whole. They could just visit one of the many websites that offer vast archives of completed essays and ‘term papers’ for download at a price. Just change the name at the top of the page and you’ll never have to suffer the Withering Stare again! This problem has become so prevalent that some teachers and lecturers in the US are now employing anti-plagiarism software in an attempt to catch the copycats.

Blatant copyright infringement aside, it’s the less obvious effects of the info-glut that really makes me worry about the future. I might read all there is to read about Mr.and Mrs. Cro-Magnon from other people’s websites, but would I be genuinely knowledgeable about the subject afterwards? I seriously doubt it – a passing acquaintance with the subject is the best I could hope for. The reasons for this are simple: there is no real work involved in this type of ‘research’ on my part, no gradual accretion of understanding through a process of intellectual investigation. Not only would I be getting spoon-fed information, I’d be supping from a dubious cup. After all, who’s to say that the facts and figures presented on Joseph Bloggs' slick Cro-Magnon website bear any relation to the truth?

If, on the other hand, I’d had to go to the library and search through volume after volume of real, researched and edited books, making notes and comparing viewpoints, evaluating the information I was slowly absorbing, I’d stand a far better chance of understanding (and remembering) the subject matter. This, though, would seem a bit too much like hard work to the members of the internet generation – those poor kids who have never known anything but search-engines and the ctrl-c and ctrl-v keystrokes.

So where are we headed? Towards a society in which nobody actually ‘knows’ anything about any given subject except where to find an essay on it, it seems. A planet of parrots, squawking reams of meaningless facts and figures copied from the parrot in the cage next door. Alas, the currency of Knowledge has been devalued; Information is the new medium of exchange.

I could probably Google up the information needed to construct a thermo-nuclear device in my garage, but without the required knowledge of the intricacies of the process, my neighborhood would soon have a much better understanding of the Stone Age. The survivors would be living in it.