Web of Knowledge

Welcome to the age of the internet. Welcome to an era where everyone is connected to the hive mind via their own personal terminals which they have on them every single moment of their existence.

We have at our disposal almost every piece of information ever known to man literally at our fingertips, and we have a means of structuring this immensity of data. Our information availability is unbelievable compared to what our ancestors had and the limitations of that.

Nowadays you can do any task by simply knowing you need to. With information availability the way it is all you need to know is what you want to know. My friends and I actually engaged in a discussion over sub-molecular particle physics over a couple of beers :D

Unlikely given our backgrounds (none of us is trained for that) but with Wikipedia and Google one can literally find out anything. We learned about the size of the observable Universe, about quarks, about the elusive bosons, about the speed of light and strange particularities of travelling near that speed and so much more in just a couple of hours.

It’s simply incredible what we’ve come to achieve and how this changes our thirst for knowledge. Nowadays I have with me the key to most of my questions, and given adequate filters I can receive a level of insight that would never be available with classical means of education.

The applications are endless; for example this week I was invited to an old friend’s party. But it was all very… 2.0. She invited me via Facebook, that prompted a link to the location’s web page, from which i took the address into Google Maps which gladly informed me that there was a bar near that location that matched the old name I knew and then I used Nokia Maps to actually get there. It’s a pretty dry example but just the interconnectivity of it all seems unbelievable.

Now, to the reason I say school is obsolete. School was designed with a certain purpose in mind and the limitations of the time. You had to learn everything by heart because you could not get it again except maybe by reading a hard to find, hard to own copy of a thick book. You also did not have the links we have on the web so everything had to be taught to you. I think half of the simple things I’ve learned in my adult life have been from the web. We need to rethink schools so they focus on developing students’ ability to learn on their own and use the web to achieve their tasks.

And before I leave you, I just wanted to share an example of the media consumption I engage in: in the past month alone I’ve read over 11000 articles just in my RSS Reader (Google Reader). That’s eleven thousand! Some people call that wasted time but it’s not. In the past month I’ve learned so much about the world around me, about recent news and events, about amazing things people make and what drives them and so on. It’s a world of wonder and we’re part of it. Let’s use that and make our lives better :)

Have a great week and don’t forget to subscribe!

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