With all due respect to Cecil, has the internet made any blot on ignorance? On the one hand it allows people to get a closer connection to facts and events. On the other hand it allows one ignoramus to more easily connect to other like-minded ignoramuses. Does it all balance out?
I suspect that it’s hurt us (i.e. increased general ignorance).
My reasoning is that there’s less money in information in the internet world, plus the internet has made TV superfluous on many counts. Both of these mean that newspapers, news shows, and news websites have had less money to do real research. To get customers, they’ve had to ramp up the politicization of news presentation, put more focus on pop culture (like Paris Hilton’s life), and put objectivity on the backburner.
People have more access to information than before, but before they had to learn stuff just by having it come up alongside the sports news or weather news every day. And that stuff was vetted by professionals for some minimum of accuracy. But just because the internet makes all the real answers available, that doesn’t mean people are going to go look it up. They’re going to assume that what they see in their newspapers today is just as strongly researched and unbiased as news was a decade or two ago.
And if they do go to look stuff up on the internet, they won’t know what to believe. You can find information on any side of everything, each citing their own experts. Most people have little to no ability to smell bullshit since most of the time they already believe in the bullshit and are just looking for something which backs it up.
Also, while the internet makes things like academic knowledge available, investigative reporters of the past were just that–investigators. You need big, prosperous news agencies to fund that sort of thing. Universities and government grants fund scientific research so investigation into those will continue and that information will show up on the internet. But even if all known news about what’s happening inside Washington DC shows up on the internet, what is “known” isn’t going to be as deep because there aren’t the people out there being sneaky and rooting out secrets.
That’s a tough question.
It’s kind of like asking whether opening the world’s largest public library in every major population center would increase or decrease ignorance. As a twenty-something who grew up watching the tail end of the home-computing and subsequent Internet revolutions the volume of information available to us with a few keystrokes boggles my mind. In grade school, I was still looking up dewy decimals by hand - a few years later teachers had to remind us to use books at all, to our collective dismay.
While obviously crackpots abound, my admittedly anecdotal claim would be that the internet has overwhelmingly decreased ignorance. With global news available through any number of media portals, the instantaneous ability to transmit information around the world in a heartbeat, I would submit that the internet has instilled “us” (the collective developed world) with a fundamental sense of interconnectedness. The hoards of factual data readily accessible and the instantaneous way in which we can communicate can only be a good thing.
Of course, it also leads to phenomena like my having to google “dewie decimal” to check whether I’d spelled it right, so you might argue that the internet’s made the rote memorization of now-trivial facts less important, since we can simply pluck it from the reservoir of the web than from our brains. So I guess it depends on your definition of ignorance.
It’s made better informed people even more informed but it also spreads ignorance and superstition. On a more fundamental level, and I see this in Higher Education, it has encouraged a conflation of ‘knowledge’ with ‘facts’ and the belief that every question has a single objective answer. In doing so it has inhibited some student’s ability to reason in the broader sense.
God - I would have killed as a student to have such access to information, analyses, philosophies and perspectives. That, even assuming I was aware of a paper, I would have to pay a fee and wait months for it to be in my hands through inter-library loan.
But it did force me to think, reason and put together a well-argued case.
No question that the fact that students have instant access to a breadth of knowledge unparalleled in human history is a good thing though.
In my experience and the experience of my peers some essential quality of the education experience has been lost (or hopefully temporarily culturally mislaid) in the process and you see the signs in a generational (and yes, I’m using a broad brush) problem with spelling, grammar and ability to present an argument (as opposed to cut, paste and plagiarize) or even work individually and not as a ‘group’.
I suspect it is both. The internet has made us less ignorant of objective facts, but allowed us to much more easily reinforce our subjective viewpoints. Nowadays, if I’m in a discussion with a friend and a fact comes under dispute, we can quickly check Wikipedia or something instead of just hoping we remember correctly. And of course, for every email you get about some urban legend or other ridiculousness, now you can just go to Snopes and find out the truth easily. Plenty of people (though not as much as we’d like, of course) have found out the truth in those regards, where previously they would have just heard it in a conversation and took the other person’s word for it. In those regards, yes, ignorance has been diminished.
However, the internet allows us to be far more choosy in what sources of information we take in, particularly when it comes to politics. Conservatives and liberals alike can find forums and blogs that serve as nothing more than an echo chamber, whereas otherwise they might be forced to talk politics in the outside world with people who actually disagree. Of course, even on this board you’ll find people saying that practically by definition, anyone who takes the opposing political viewpoint is ignorant, so we’d have a much harder time settling on where exactly the “ignorance” lies. Then again, conspiracy theorists and other batshit crazy ideas benefit from this echo chamber self-selection, so I am sure even the partisans can find some common ground that in some ways ignorance has risen.
Personally, I think the ignorance diminishing positives outweigh the ignorance enhancing negatives. But it’s far from a total victory.
I’m voting for increased ignorance - as well as increased knowledge (it’s not a zero-sum argument).
IMHO - Fundamentally, in the pre-internet age there were a lot of barriers to getting information published: cost, editorial consent, publisher support, marketplace pressures, peer review, etc. This served as a kind of filter to keep much of the nonsense somewhat at bay. In addition, seekers of information had to take a more active part in gathering the information from written sources.
Now with the internet I can write any damn fool thing I want and, to the casual passive viewer, it is essentially equal to every other piece of information. Without those filters that existed in the pre-internet age then there is a greater danger that more people will be walking around thinking shit = shinola.
And yet you never did. While the plural of anecdote is not data, I don’t think that’s a meaningless point.
Did the invention of the printing press increase or decrease ignorance?
Sure there is a lot more information out there and there are far fewer filters on it. But that also means that people who really want to learn about something will have to take into account all these conflicting viewpoints and make their own decisions. Dumbasses who just want to post teh shit = cool!!, well no one really cares what they think or do anyway.
Good answer.
This is sort of what I wanted to say. The Internet has vastly increased the amount of available information for anyone who wants to find it. However, it has also made it vastly easier for like-minded people to congregate, and reinforce one anothers’ ignorant beliefs. This is where the comparison to the printing press breaks down almost entirely; the printing press is a means for information delivery, but it’s not like everybody who buys a particular book can use it to talk immediately to all the owners of the same book everywhere in the world.
So I would summarize it like this: While the Internet (like the printing press) has contributed to the slow and marginal reduction of ignorance overall, it has (unlike the printing press) solidified and reinforced certain pockets of ignorance.
I don’t know if that’s a net positive or negative.
I’d guess it just highlighted something elitists have always known but populists like to deny - it’s not critical that every member of a society be intelligent. A society can still function reasonably well if five percent of the population knows how to get things done, and the remaining 95% just do their jobs, collect their paychecks, sit on their couches and watch American Idol, and generally just shut the hell up. Anyone who needs useful information has always been able to find it, and anyone who wants confirmation of their feel-good preconceptions (“My sports team lost - it’s the fault of the Jews!”) has always been to find that, too.
Ignorance always has a baseline of zero. There’s no difference between somebody who’s ignorant because he didn’t read one book and somebody’s who ignorant because he didn’t read a thousand books. People who choose to avoid learning will always have that choice available.
What the internet has done is make other choices more available. Like the printing press, it has made it easier for people who want to learn to do so.
So overall, I’d say the internet has decreased ignorance. Ignorant people are no more ignorant than they were before but knowledgeable people are more knowledgeable.
I think the Internet is truly the best thing that ever happened in the world. Why? Because it is the first thing that lets us cut right past propoganda.
Sure, governments or societies can still tell us what to think. And there will always be some people who will listen and obey.
But, I do see that it is getting harder to divide people into “us” and “them”. Thinking people, even the ones that don’t like to admit it, see more and more that what we thought of as “them” are people just like us - they worry about food on the table, bills, their kids. They are happy over little things and they love and marry and grow old and die just like us.
I disagree with this reasoning because I don’t think you characterize the older, pre-internet sources correctly. I don’t think they maintained a “minimum of accuracy” or attempted to so. As for bias, much more truth is unearthed by biased sources than unbiased ones. History is full of instances where the ‘authoritative’ and ‘unbiased’ sources of information deliberately misled the public. Just look at the Spanish-American War, which started thanks to bogus reporting about the destruction of the U. S. S. Maine in Havana.
On the internet there are good sources and bad sources. Before the internet, there were mostly just bad sources.
For many who really use the Internet, you have to already know what you are doing.
For those who think the web is the Internet, it has made the teeming minions more ignorant.
Some good thought-provoking ideas.
How does government-enforced ignorance apply? For example, Iran tightly controls the local media but it’s nigh impossible to keep out all internet sources. Does the internet expose some Iranians to other viewpoints, thus lessening ignorance? If so, how beneficial is it? Satellite TV has expose Iranians to American culture but I doubt Baywatch has done anything but raise ignorance.
I always figured if you wanted to undermine Iran’s theocratic government, smuggle in hundreds of thousands of cheap and easy satellite dishes, tuned to pick up a constant broadcast of Baywatch, James Bond movies, Beverly Hills 90210 and porn, porn, porn.
It’s decreased ignorance.
I don’t think arguing otherwise is reasonable. People just like to assume that there was a time when people were less ignorant. I find that very hard to believe.
I don’t think the level of peoples disposition towards ignorance has gone up, but the amount of things of which they are ignorant has definitely increased.
There is plenty of useful information out there for the curious minded, but the level of curiosity in the general public does not seem to have risen correspondingly.
Do yuo mean that they are more aware that they are ignorant than ever before?
Because somehow the average person I talk to at least knows there is something called Quantum Mechanics and roughly understand how a steam engine or a combustion engine works. Do you think that dirt farmers 100 years ago knew these things?
Prove that you have some sort of meaningful idea of what the level of curiousity of the general public was in past times, or in this one for that matter.
Basically people are taking anecdotal experience. ‘I come across a lot of morons on the internet therefore there must be more of them now.’, when the reality is you interact with more people than you would’ve 50 years ago so the amount of every type of person yuo talk to is greatly increased.