Kids Today; Infotoxicated

Do you remember the smell of old books in the library? And the sound of the little wooden drawers being slid open and clunked shut, as you scoured through the Dewey decimal system?

As the sacred silence was upheld, there was this magnanimous feeling of standing before the world's secret knowledge contained inside the pages. Waiting to be decoded, translated, filtered and finally rebottled as your own discovery of truth.

Learning along with process of creating reports and presentations to share our new found knowledge of the world, I would liken it to how wine is made. Every grape hand picked and sorted and separated from the weeds and the leaves the same as one sorts through hundreds of books to find the best sources.

 It is mashed and the excess removed, in much the way our brains would disseminate the important from the irrelevant, depending on our topic's focus. Finally, after having time to think about, or age, it is bottled and distributed to share. 

Each bottle, like each book report or presentation, is a whole new discovery of creation. As if we'd never seen a grape before. We hadn't though, not quite like this. Unique. Special. Filtered through your eyes and experience. Rather than filtered through an algorithm.

 I imagine wine made from robot picked grapes and filtered through an algorithm would taste like crap. The drinker wouldn't be impressed and the maker could never be proud of what he didn't really make.

Today, with Google and Bing, the entire world's encyclopedia and a library rivaling that of congress exist in our pockets. We ask a question and it spits out an answer. No quest for truth. No discovery of knowledge. No excitement and nothing to be proud of, certainly nothing sacred.

No thinking required.

Rather than using their minds to turn information into fine wine, our kids have data, distilled to proof and straight down the gullet. None of us even know how this hard stuff was made or from whence it came. The experience is cold algorithm filtered infotoxication.

...next blog

 

"We've dropped the ball and they've given up their glove."

"Old Time Baseball Gloves" by 

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