A Brief Musing about Information

I think it's important to know things.

That shouldn't be too surprising to hear from an professional educator, and you probably wouldn't think that many people in the general population would disagree with the sentiment. But more and more in my classes, I've run up against a contrary mindset.

When a student would declare that America fought the Nazis in World War I, or (to borrow an example from a recent episode of The Amazing Race) claim that he or she has never heard of Stonehenge, my instinct used to be to shake my head in disbelief that such basic pieces of information haven't lodged in their heads. What started to strike me after a while, however, was not that they didn't know things, but that they had no problem with not knowing things. In fact, they thought I was kind of weird for thinking it was important for them to walk around with that kind of information in their heads all the time.

Naturally, I started asking them questions to figure out why there was such a gap between our worldviews. As someone who loves information for information's sake to the point that he made up trivia cards about the bride and groom for his wedding, I had to put aside my assumptions and consider their perspective, and here is my best estimate of the situation.

When I was growing up, information was something you had to seek. If you were watching a TV show and saw an actor who looked familiar, but you couldn't quite remember how you knew him, what could you do to get an answer? You wouldn't know his name, so you would have to wait for the end credits and hope to see it as it flashed by. If you were lucky enough to get his name, you would need to ask other people what else he was in or go to a library to try to find some publication with a list of shows and cast information or track down the phone number of a studio or agent or something and then call and ask, or...well, you get the picture. The effort needed to find things out made information valuable to hold onto when you came across it, like water at an oasis.   

My students have always lived in a world in which information is readily accessible. You could even say that it's the medium in which they live. It pulses through the very air they breathe and shows up on their electronic devices wherever they are. If they see an actor and want to know why he seems familiar, they can find out in less than a minute from nearly anywhere at any time with a minimum of effort. And once they find out that piece of information, why would they keep it in their head? They can get it again just as easily if they ever need it in the future. Why carry a bottle of water when you're swimming?

Add to this scenario the element of social networking and it seems even more logical that the idea of any one person burdening himself or herself with information that costs mental energy to pick up and carry sounds ludicrous to my students. As long as someone somewhere can find it out, no one person needs to know it. 

Again, my instinct is to shake my head at the state of things. But little good has ever come from that kind of handbasket grumbling, and it's worth asking what the consequences of this shift really are. Maybe my students have a point when they complain that it's a sadistic exercise to make them memorize and regurgitate facts they can easily look up. Or maybe their reliance on the surrounding stream of information substantially changes their experience of the world in negative ways. What happens when you encounter every new thing empty-handed, without the weight of information to help contextualize it? I'm sure we'll find out the answer to that question, even if that answer is then immediately dropped right back in the information pool.