There is a difference between say: Looking up an entry in the dictionary and actually knowing the definition. Being able to look something up does not mean we have become informed gods. If anything I think that we are giving up recalling information for quick, lazy, typing in the google bar. I love that computers have enhanced the quality of my life. I just think that we need to learn the material instead of recalling only the web address where information is stored.
We can choose to use these powers to become genius and expand on our own ideas or we can become lazier slobs that drool on ourselves and think we are clever because we can find an image or caption to fit anything and know absolutely nothing. I do it all the time.....
Let's not forget that a lot of online sources for information aren't even legit. yet. Some are..most aren't. People know that so you have to pay, usually, for real information built inside programs. We are not information gods for knowing the specific address of specious wikipedia cites. I really don't trust the quality of information I am getting. There are trusted sources and credible sources, but you also have to know enough already about the topic to know what those are, and when you are being fed a line of bs.
This society is dumbing down. This isn't power, this is the ultimate laziness. Instead of figuring things out for myself, or grabbing a credible text...I look it up first on the internet....Maybe even watch a google video on how someone else did it. That makes me an idiot that is capable of watching images and mimicry. Right now I'm relying on this spell checker to spell things I would have normally looked up, and I used to know how to spell everything. I'm becoming an idiot.
The people on the cellar, if anything good can be said about cellarites as a group, are usually at least average or above. A lot of them know things about topics before sourcing something to back it up. Remember that other people have a harder time figuring things out and what they are learning in mass is specious....
I find it interesting that someone mentioned wikipedia already in this thread for fact-checking. Wikipedia is consistently wrong about a lot of subjects, or has left very valuable information out. It's completely unreliable and we have decided as a society that it is completely legit. It's kind of like presidents...People voted it in as a socially acceptable knowledge base. I will admit that there are items I've looked up there that were helpful or there were obscure details I didn't know before that I found illuminating. But mostly it's poor quality and people eat it up.
Ok. I'm torn and I think about this topic a lot because I'm usually at a computer for 7-10 hours a day, and now I'm getting a new computer today (yeah!) for home and home office use. So we can say I'll be on the computer all the time, even while I'm watching a movie!! But I found myself trying to calculate tax this morning without the use of my books program and found out that I'm a complete idiot that has resources. Refined laziness. It's a fucking art form. My laziness is about to become
even more sophisticated with my new computer. I am obviously misusing technology if I don't know things myself. (I still know some things thank god)
This is a book, I'm sorry, but I'm headed in two different extremes when it comes to this, and I don't have any real conclusion yet. You should have seen how ecstatic I was the first time I got to create an illusion of something in photoshop, now that was magic! When I got to remove an object in a photo, then patch it. I said woo-hoo!!! Magic!!! Maybe there would be more magic in real life if I weren't at this computer boring everyone.
Thanks for listening.