Stephen king knows things im afraid. I know this because i now things and so does stephen. Not that i cared to. I don’t want a balloon, don’t eat me!
Anywho, back to the point of the post. All things are bad. Not information, not technology, nothing in that sense is bad. But it is going to go very bad as usual. Info good, tech good, but in the wrong hands it’s very bad, very very bad.
See it for once. All things are a curse right now. Tech, info, bananas, q-tips, diapers, all of it is bad. The info and tech can be the best things us mutated apes have ever seen but it won’t be for now. Info and tech is only bombs, only control, manipulation, a cage, war, theft, and of course large piles of idiotic and unfairly made cash.
(Help me. This isn’t even me speaking right now. Can anyone help me. It’s like they are forcing me to do it and i don’t want to at all. Im not me anymore, im them. Oh shit im going to die.)
OK… might offend someone with this but I’ll post it anyway. All of it is opinion and speculation.
Older people (no Internet when they were children) seem to struggle a lot more than my generation and today’s kids do with the internet. They are more uncritical of information they find, they do not double check dubious claims, they do not use their devices intuitively and are much worse at troubleshooting. Example: they often think Wikipedia is unreliable… younger people know it is usually more thorough and more reliable than encyclopedias. You can click the links and check the sources, so if something seems false or biased you can find out more about it in seconds.
Older people also suck at googling. They forget it is possible and start guessing and arguing when you can look something up in 5 seconds and end the argument.
My granddad keeps making mistakes when he tries to remember things. He will repeat things completely wrong sometimes. I think this is a result of it having been time-consuming and tedious to double check things before the Internet, and he simply never has and still never does double check things online. That leads to more mistakes.
But seriously though… is there a technology impaired diagnosis yet? Think it would fit 50% of the population or more. 99% of those would probably be people aged 30+.
What would help? If there’s something you can think of that would help and I can do it, I want to help. You’re funny and goofy and smart and thoughtful and it frustrates me that you’re going through this.
I read an interesting article the other day, it mentions the following:
A fundamental problem faced by the general public and the members of an
academic discipline in the information age is how to find the most
authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date information about an
important topic.
These three requirements are apparently hard to satisfy for any information source. For instance, Wikipedia is not authoritative, arguably not comprehensive, but may be fairly up to date. A good old sourcebook is authoritative, not comprehensive, and if it concerns an active discipline, likely to be outdated almost the day it is published.
You mention that no information should be taken for granted, and at first sight this seems like a sensible attitude to me. Yet if taken very (too?) seriously, such an attitude could amount to having to start from scratch each and every time you are to write something. I think there is something to say for trust in authoritative sources, such that one can build upon these and expand knowledge and information, rather than being stuck in doing the same things over and over again just to check the sources. This is taking your remark to the extreme and probably making a travesty out of it, but there is a place for trust and authority in the business of producing knowledge and information. (“standing on the shoulders of giants”, etc.) The problem, of course, and maybe now more so than ever before, is who to trust.
This article articulates nicely one possible model for high quality information sources. In this case, it concerns the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (which you might know of), but the model seems to me to be in no way restricted to this particular domain.
That’s a good point.
Maybe I should have added that by ‘questioning the sources’ I meant things that mostly pass as 1. An obvious, undoubted ‘facts’ ( such as judgments, valuations, standards, comparisons, criticism) and 2. Statements legitimized by itself, postulates a particular truth as universal ( oftenly founded in political, journalism, philosophical,
religious discourse) and 3. News.
I don’t believe that robots will replace humans. But books will be replaced by PDFs and kindles. I expect that future generations will have to go to museum to see how books looked like.
I wonder if modern science would be possible if scientists still relied on books and printed journals to find out about studies… If yes then I think it’s just a matter of time before the answer is no. Books are incredibly inefficient, but they are nice to hold in your hands.
There was a good commercial a while ago… Its about a man who tortures his family to use technology (tablets, laptops, phones) instead of their old fashioned substitutes
( books, paper notes, photo albums…). The last scene shows the man sitting on the toilet and realizing that there is no toilet paper left. He calls for his wife. She hands him a tablet with a toilet paper picture on it.
