Everybody Knows Everything Now

The other day my friend Richard said, “We now live in a world where everybody knows everything. It’s not what you know that matters anymore. It’s what you do with what you know.” Richard’s comment succinctly points out that anyone with access to a Web browser can know almost anything they would like to know in a flash. It’s changing the way we teach and the way we communicate.
Yesterday I met a pediatrician who’s been teaching medical students in a nearby medical school for ten years. I asked him, “What’s changed since you started teaching?” He told me the biggest change is that they are teaching students a good deal more about how to find the information they’re looking for from reliable sources rather than relying on memorization. He said, “It’s pretty easy to find how to treat a disease state but what we worry about is a doctor’s ability to determine which disease to look for.” He added, “Doctors need to learn how to observe patients, talk to them and above all, listen.” Apparently those skills are still not emphasized in medical school. Finally, he said, “Memorizing certain things is still important but it isn’t as critical as it once was.”
I for one am practically overwhelmed by the reality of having so much information at our fingertips. As a writer I’m delighted to have such easy access to so many sources of information. Then again, there aren’t many good defenses for getting the facts wrong anymore. And precious few excuses for postponing my writing when research is such a snap.
On a visit to the local library recently, browsing in the reference section, I came across the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. Most of you will recall that the Guide provides an index of articles from selected popular periodicals published in the 20th and 21st centuries. In ancient times, before the World Wide Web, we used the Guide to find information we were looking for when we had term papers to write. No doubt some of you recall writing down the desired article references on small pieces of white note paper so you could search through heavy, bound editions of magazines or; if you were unlucky, be required to work your way through endless reels of microfilm. All this just so you could find the three sentences you needed to support your rebellious contention that Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach had nothing to do with religion. If you haven’t visited the reference section of your local library recently you might be surprised by the changes you encounter. For starters, you won’t need any tiny white slips of paper.
The Guide is still available of course, on line now. And, instead of simply providing a list of various topics, the magazine’s name, edition and page numbers, you can now click your way right to the article you need to prove your brother-in-law is an idiot. To make it even easier to get at what you are searching for, our local library (and perhaps yours?) doesn’t even order a hard copy of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature anymore. In fact they buy Gale Publishing products and make them available on line from home to anyone with a library card.
While pointing and clicking certainly saves us a lot of time, I do wonder if speed itself robs us of needed time to reflect on the information we’ve gathered. Over the years I have learned the hard way that as it is with driving well over the speed limit, speed in communication can have deleterious results. There was a certain value I think in the labor involved in research. Limited time and tired eyes often forced us to return to the library a few times to get what we needed. We had time to reflect and consider what message we wanted to send. Celebrities are plagued in my opinion, by live microphones, texts and tweets. A thoughtless comment is nearly impossible to catch up to, let alone fix. Ozzie Guillen, the manager of the Miami Marlins is struggling with that problem right now. He isn’t the first and he won’t be the last.
I love having information easily at my fingertips. Yet, I pray that what’s on the tip of my tongue doesn’t make me long for the days when knowledge played hard to get. As Richard said, it’s what we do with what we know that matters.

Copyright 2012, Len Serafino All rights reserved.