In praise of knowledge

PLUS A[section]a change, plus c'est la mA'me chose, or as theFrench would say: the more things change, the more they stay thesame.

I was intrigued to see a head-line last week screaming that theubiquitous Google was making us dumb. On reading the article, I wasreminded of something English lexographer of the 18th century DrSamuel Johnson said when confronted with a library full of books.

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or weknow where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into anysubject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books havetreated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backsof books in libraries." - Samuel Johnson (Life of Johnson).

Of course I had to Google this using my imperfect memory of thequote, an abridged "you don't need to know things, just where tolook them up".

Psychologist Dr Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor at ColumbiaUniversity, found we use the internet to access information so much,we suffer withdrawal symptoms when we can't find an immediateanswer.

"This is preliminary evidence that when people expect informationto remain continuously available, such as we expect with internetaccess, we are more likely to remember where to find it than we areto remember the details of the item," the authors wrote.

"In any long-term relationship, people typically develop a groupmemory," said Dr Sparrow, whose findings were published in thejournal Science.

Reading a comment on the blog, one poster noted that 2400 yearsago Socrates railed against the invention of writing as it wouldruin our memories.

It must be a human thing to think each new age is worse than theone before. The objective markers would suggest otherwise. More ofus live longer, happier lives than before.

That some of this happiness seems to be a belief the newgeneration is not worthy of our legacy is a perverse enjoyment.