When I read about life 200 years ago, I realize that things are very different now. That is true about many things, including education and information availability. If you use Google or the Microsoft search engine Bing, you will be hard put to search for any topic that will not produce some results of some kind. That seemed true in the past but I just tried it now. I know that if I search for "octopus" or "Martin Seligman", I will get results. But what if I try some nonsense, something garbled and mixed up? I tried "xx12mk". Immediately got something from a sales site of electrical equipment on a web page written in Russian. Google said it had translated the page but most of it was not translated.
The point is that for people with a connection to the internet, all sorts of knowledge is readily available. In our town, you can go into the public library and use a computer there to search the internet. There is also a university library and anyone can browse the books and materials in it.
It is not just information that can be conveyed on a monitor screen or through speakers. There are groups, sports, classes, activities, trips of many kinds. Some people urge older citizens to learn a foreign language or a musical instrument to keep their minds flexible and able to learn and change. Such activities are available in many forms, including classes, individual lessons and videos.
The book that often comes to mind about knowledge available today is David Weinberger's. The full title of the book is useful: Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Are Not the Facts, Experts are Everywhere and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room. The situation is not entirely new, as situations usually aren't. In the late 1940's, public libraries in many places in the US were well developed and could help any inquisitive citizen get almost any sort of information.
There are, of course, limitations on human knowledge. There are diseases we don't understand, life forms we don't know much about, astronomical bodies we are ignorant of, and many sorts of personal information, such as what you should do next.
Personal reactions to the oversupply vary. It is only an OVERsupply because nobody can read it all, know it all, use it all. There too many facts and our time and energy are too limited. The limitations on us and in us are always there. I think that most of us use computers that are much faster than we are. Yesterday, after a talk on iPads, one educated, thoughtful man said that I had convinced him: he didn't want an iPad. It was too complicated. I may have overemphasized the multiple features of the device: camera, video and audio recorder, the entire internet, over a million short programs (the "apps").
I sympathize with the impulse to just shy away from too much. Years ago, a student told me that she and her husband drove 60 miles to a large electronics store for a television recorder. The store had so many models that the array of choices was too overwhelming and they just left and drove home. I wonder if they ever got one.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
