Bourne said:
grimsprice said:
To which my reply still stands. What is the difference between reading something on the internet in 5 minutes, and reading something in the library that takes an hour.
Learning is learning. If you do it on the moon with Druidic rune tablets, its still learning.
From personal experience, knowledge gained from a book is more difficult to obtain, and thus more value is attached to that knowledge; knowledge gained from a quick google search will likely not last quite so long in the memory banks.
But seriously, now that the internet is around, fuck books, am I right?
This I say as you have told it, is the truth. (About knowledge being valuable)
Long before there were any books, the transfer of knowledge relied heavily on word of mouth. Transfer of information took a long time to circle the globe, in comparison to present day where information is spread in a matter of seconds.
What defines how this information is understood by a large majority of the human population is the time it takes to circle the globe.
What defines how we as individuals understand the information we search for is the effort we put into learning and acquiring that bit of knowledge. And I state, it is NOT the time we put into the medium that defines what information we acquire, but rather a whole lot more.
Whether there are complications in acquiring the data we seek, such as confusion or inattentiveness, or you are a natural learner and easily inherit knowledge from the medium are individual issues and are not to be regarded when considering the whole of humanity.
Humans are naturally curious and concerned beings, and those qualities are what drive the 'quest' for knowledge.
Now, think of this: If the information we were hoping to retrieve, say, an informative book on cooking (which spreads the knowledge of cooking, wether it be good cooking, or bad.
) took a couple of hours to first retrieve it (perhaps by way of transportation, or the book was in a library, or just was hiding under a pile of dust. But really, this does not matter; the time frame for searching for the book is really a part of that 'quest'.) and then was read to completion would provide some insight on the information at hand, which would be cooking.
Now, let's try to retrieve the same book on the Internet. (assuming you know the name of the book and the contents are available online.) There really is no quest to search for a computer with working internet, as most people have this by now. (Most likely if you do not have a computer, you really are missing out on grand opportunities, but it's a contradiction to say you ARE because every person is different. In general and in reality, there are huge opportunities to be made, as much of the world relies on the Internet. Also, if you are reading this and don't personally own a computer, it's never too late to get a computer!
) By the time you would have either Google searched or Wiki'd the book, you would have gotten what you wanted. Was it the time you searched (almost instantaneously, unless you didn't find it the first time, but this usually happens anyway as there is so much data in existence.
) that gave you what you the info, or the effort to actually understand the material that defined what you found out?
-Here's to put into deep perspective: It takes only a couple seconds to find the right data on the Internet, but the right data you are looking for in a book may take hours. If your quest of knowledge was so important, then the effort you took into actually understanding the information serves as a reward for your curiosity, not the reward for finding it in the first place.
With regard to Internet searching, it can be argued that the medium is dumbing down the way we look at knowledge because we are using quick shortcuts to reduce the efforts we implement, shortcuts such as tags, skimming over information to find keywords, skipping articles and disregarding context in favor of raw information. What information you can find in the book would be learned through the effort of understanding the context, but if you believe such shortcuts do not exist in the literature medium, then you are wrong. Shortcuts do exist in book reading, as they do in Internet searches. But.. internet shortcuts have this as a prevalent theme for the 'quest' of knowledge, while with books is used as merely a tool to enhance the retrieval of finding the data you seek in the first place. Merely a tool.
That is all I may add to this sweet little article. To all, I say: "Keep Questin'!"
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-END-- (Yes, I'm being serious, this is an END thing here. I had to do it just because what I wrote was so long. But.. I have one more thing to say. Oh and thank you for reading this far and for acknowledging my opinions and views. I am open to comments and responses.) --
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With regard to Wikipedia, it is a database that allows individuals to edit and view the information that is stored. The database itself has all the information many individuals can hope to acquire in this 'quest' for knowledge and as it is a public domain that is open for interpretation from any (most likely, just need an internet connection, right?) individual from any region in the world. As such, I can say that since it consists of the efforts of many to provide information for the rest of the world, I can call it a 'portal to humanity's knowledge.' Has a neat ring to it.
Wikipedia is most likely very accurate because there are millions of users, as well as editors of the information it contains. Think of it as a strainer with millions of tiny little holes, and the information is grainy water, with some bits of junk information here and there, and the water being the actual raw data. I think you get the picture.
