All Things in Moderation

“Don’t Blame Google for Ignorance” is the title of a post from the New York Times “Idea of the Day.”

“Some say rapid Internet search is killing general knowledge, the retention of key facts, from capital cities to historic dates — long the marker of an educated mind.” Yet another way in which the Internet is dumbing us down.

The blog quotes a journalism professor, Brian Cathcart of Kingston University in London, who disagrees. Knowledge, he says, and what kinds of knowledge we need to have, are essentially moving targets, “a society’s pool of shared knowledge is ever-changing.”

And the targets have moved throughout history. Cathcart points out that when printing with movable type was invented in the 15^th century, there were predictions of doom, of the death of knowledge. In fact, to the contrary, the printing press increased the reach of knowledge and facilitated an expansion of knowledge greater than any invention since the development of standardized writing.

And speaking of writing, almost exactly 1,000 years before Gutenberg, Socrates weighed in against that then fairly new invention (he never wrote anything down himself, we have Plato to thank for transcribing his arguments). The reason? It would lead to wrong belief and misguided opinion. Writing, as opposed to oral discourse, would enable people to find ideas and opinions and think about them all on their own without guidance from a wise mentor — like, maybe, Socrates.

So, just to summarize here: In around 400 BCE, some of us worried about unchaperoned access to written knowledge and opinion. In 1460 or so AD, some of us worried about universal, unchaperoned access to printed knowledge and opinion. And now, in 2009, some of us worry about an “unmoderated” Internet, the etherized spread of knowledge and opinion.

It’s a 2,000-year trend. How on earth will ordinary people be able to tell the Internet weeds from the good stuff? Should we worry?

Images: Johannes Gutenberg, Encyclopedia Britannica Online, Jacques Louis David, "The Death of Socrates," Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Introduction

I do a lot of weeding. It doesn’t require much concentration unless you’re skirting poison ivy. My mind wanders. What’s on my mind? Lots of stuff. I could call it “Beyond the Marketing List.”

I guess I’m eccentric — geeky, even. You won’t find much pop culture here. I read, listen to NPR, watch virtually no television, and have a 60-hour-a-week job.

From gardening to geopolitics, the mundane to the arcane, I’ll talk about whatever seems interesting on a given day.

Oh, and a gallimaufry? It’s a kind of stew — a mixture of a lot of stuff.

Here are some possible ingredients:

• Getting Shorter: From Fielding to Twitter
• I-95 and the Garden State Parkway: Columbus Boulevard — perfectly suited to more traffic?
• The Great Cape May Cat Debacle of 2007: One man’s vendetta
• Education on the Assembly Line: A rant
• On Venery: A Game
• Immigrants from Asia: A guide to relentless vines
• Three Revolutions: From Socrates to Gutenberg and beyond
• What’s for Dinner? Encounters with the deer family
• A short course in weed ID

Tune in.