Internet & Human Knowledge

The idea that we have, through the Internet, all of the human knowledge, at the tip of our fingers is patently false.  We have the greatest almanac, encyclopedia, academic papers, etc. We can find information about just any topic you can think of.  What is not there is deep knowledge of particular topics.  Take engineering for instance.  Will the internet help you solve complex engineering problems requiring knowledge of power series of differential equations or vector differential calculus or complex integrals, or Taylor and Laurent series, or Laplace transformations, or the knowledge of which will help you solve your problem.  This is true of so many fields of endeavour.

So no, the Internet does not provide all of the human knowledge.  Instead, HEAVY USE encourages us to become a non-thinking web surfer where we acquire superficial knowledge about many topics.  There is evidence from many studies that the Internet is actually changing our brain’s neuronal structure, in a bad way.  We start looking for instant gratification from our search engines and have difficulty reading a document to the end, often because we get lost in the hyperlinks and ancillary knowledge.  It is gradually depriving our brain of the capacity to concentrate deeply on a single subject, the ability to read books and retain them in long term memory.  We lose the ability for critical thinking and creativity.

If you are an expert in a field, then the Internet can be of great value to you… unless you start spending two hours a day or more, randomly surfing the web or follow too many FB groups, emails, and text messages on your smartphone.  There are strategies that you can use to evade this pervasive, invasive, time wasting, technology.  You can have your email refresh only every hour, you can get apps that block certain web sites (e.g., facebook.com, google.com, etc.) for certain time periods in your days…