Fact or crap? Dixon says it’s getting harder to tell, and the Internet is to blame.
I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it, but apparently there’s all these computers linked together like some virtual global electronic spider’s web (the web is electronic, I mean, not the spider) – a kind of a world-wide web, as it were.
Every computer can connect to every other computer, and this enables the lightning-fast dissemination of all sorts of information. By “all sorts”, I mean mainly pornography and old jokes.
I did some reading in a “book” last week, and it turns out that the Internet was originally invented for university academics (or was it the military?) to swap their jokes and porn and to write smutty messages to each other about the latest intake of grad students.
But academics’ jokes generally aren’t really all that good (Q: What do you get when you cross an elephant with a banana? A: Elephant x banana x sin[theta]*), so they decided to let other people use their network so they’d have better gags for their staff parties.
The rest is history. The jokes got better and better and now we have Google, and we have Facebook – the best method yet devised for insecure narcissists to pretend to the world that they’re really very popular.
It turns out that sharing a lot of information really, really quickly, has led to some completely unintended consequences. It has, for example, been a total boon to every half-witted, crackpot conspiracy theorist; it’s now possible for the inane ramblings of a madman to reach millions, a fair proportion of whom won’t recognise them for what they are.
But the really unintended consequence of the Internet is that it’s slowly but surely making us all stupid. I know whereof I speak. And it’s because all of the knowledge and wisdom that people once carried around in their heads is inexorably migrating onto the Internet.
Think about it. Someone asks you a question. How often is your first response to Google it? And then to read Wikipedia? I have a colleague who has edited Wikipedia pages on subjects he knows nothing about, usually when he’s drunk. The pages are funnier for it, or so we think, but not necessarily more accurate. But how would you know which are the bits he’s added to the page, and what’s actually true?
Instead of learning stuff, remembering it and then applying it, we’re increasingly relying on the Internet as a repository of information that we can access anywhere and any time we need it. Among the geeks and nerds who think this stuff is cool (because they’re selling it), it’s called “the cloud”.
This has led to the absurd situation where my iPhone battery goes dead and my IQ falls 30 points.
(While I’m on the “cloud” – have you seen that Microsoft TV ad with the couple sitting in the third-world airport, who are told that their flight has been delayed/cancelled, and to amuse themselves they “go to the cloud” and link up to their home PC and start watching videos and stuff? Very impressive – but what I learned from that ad is that third-world airports have better Internet connections than any airport I’ve been to in Australia.)
But because we access all this information in largely the same way, and it all seems to occupy roughly the same place in the information “hierarchy” – type in an address, click on a few buttons and there you have it – I believe we’re losing the critical ability to distinguish between fact and crap. And that’s bad news for us all.
Except for the purveyors of crap, of course. They’re rubbing their hands.
* The cross-product of two vectors has the magnitude of the product of the magnitudes times the sine of the angle between the vectors. It’s true. It’s on the Internet. But to think this joke is funny you apparently have to accept that elephants and bananas are vectors; you would not believe the argument this has prompted among academics.
Dixon Bainbridge can be contacted via the Professional Planner HUB – www.professionalplanner.com.au/hub – and he’ll get back to you, unless his battery is flat again.
