Fighting the scourge of e-literacy (Part 1)

Not that long ago it was common to hear people say, “knowledge is power.” And these were people who knew what they were talking about. Imagine that. Actually knowing something had value. It was even (dare I say) important. It’s practically Amish. Today thanks in part to the restless impatience brought on by countless of tons of pharmaceuticals slowly dissolving in the nation’s water supply we say, “information is power.” Though it’s usually blurted out too quickly to be understood. Infahmashunispowah!!! Say it loud! Say it faster! Faster, dammit!!

Who has time to deal with all that tedious analysis and boring thinking we used to do “back in the day”? Things move fast now! We need instant solutions – instant solutions for our instant problems. Fortunately, the Internet feeds us a breathless, uninterrupted 24-hour a day stream of raw data without regard to favor or even old-school accuracy.

Okay, so we all agree information has somehow become power. Here’s some information for you: It rained. Celtics scored 103. A man named Edward. Paper is made from trees. This sentence is six words long.

Aside from a trip down Surreal Lane and the personal fun I had coming up with that last sentence; that was an exercise in pointlessness. Which is precisely my point. An endless stream of isolated infobits is about as valuable as a paint-by-number of Elvis at the Last Supper. On velvet.

The point is, we’re in such a screaming hurry to get at the information we’re not actually accomplishing anything. The hurry is the activity. Waving your arms and running in a circle is now very impressive. We don’t bother putting together the data points because that takes time. We don’t bother asking for context because that takes time. We don’t notice that without context unrelated date points are surreal. But boy, do we have a pile of information at hand. We’ve got a pile of something alright.

Being on the Internet is a lot like looking at a vase you’ve just dropped. All the pieces are there, and with some effort it could be something. But it’s not. Instead it’s a disjointed, disconnected fragmented mess. It’s up to you to clean it up and make sense of it. But you won’t. You don’t have the time. More often than not, you’ll pick up a couple of the larger pieces, squint your eyes and assume you have a pretty good idea of what the vase kind of, sort of, maybe once looked like. And you’d be dead wrong.

But who has time to be right? By the time you stopped to piece even two pieces of information together, the information went stale and out of date and you forgot what you went online to find in the first place. Hey, look at that, downloadable music clips from David Hasselhoff. Unpublished pictures of Obama. Video of a kitten and a duck sleeping together. Wait, what was I talking about again?

This seems like just the right place to stop for the moment. Having presented what annoys me about the Internet, I’ll continue shortly in Part 2 to take a look at the result of this fast-forward evolution – and where I see it taking us.