wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

ph - there was - it was called a library...where you had to actually work for the stuff...and we know how intellectual work is now a 4-letter to way too many Americans..

An interesting book to read (even just a few chapters on the subject) is "The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium - America Culture on the Brink" by Mark Dery. It was published in 1999 and reflects in very interesting terms on the nature of American culture at the fin de siécle. The observations about human behavior with regard to the web speak reams to many of today's realities. At 38, it gets a bit creepy as well to think back to the early days of the internet. It's like looking at one's life as an old sitcom.

And I disagree with the guest's claims that nearly everyone's an expert because of the web. More like specious pseudo-experts. If the guest was on trial for murder, would he be willing to rely on testimony from one of his so called "experts"?

I just saw a very apt example of this on my facebook feed after listening to the program this morning. Someone had posted an image of Obama with some facts about his actions during his term in office, and one of the comments on the photo was "I can google why it's wrong in a second. WTF?"
It's quite an interesting phenomenon, that 'refutation' can consist in the mere claim that one could refute the facts if one wanted to, rather than the presentation of actual relevant information.

The easy access, digital culture is encouraging laziness, including intellectual laziness. Push-button info is not being adequately integrated into "knowledge". It doesn't have to be this way, but it's happening because we are not dealing with the very real cognitive effects of digital dope.

You cannot Google answers when taking standardized tests. This is why SAT scores are continuously dropping. Internet access to knowledge is great but rote memorization is vital to learning as well.

Einstein said (paraphrasing): why waste time memorizing what can be looked up.

Well, books have a way to send the reader to the sources the writer used: references/footnotes. But the reader has to go find those sources, which used to mean finding another book or a journal article. Now even books cite websites, & when they do cite other books, many of them are available online. You can't click on a link, but you can find the same source pretty quickly by searching on the author & title.

Let's be honest: this dude wrote a traditional book because he couldn't make any money participating in one of those wonderful "communities." What this say about the validity of online knowledge?

Coincidentally, Prof. Edzard Ernst (IIRC) tweeted this earlier today:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22166182

“CONCLUSIONS:

The quality of information on depression and schizophrenia on Wikipedia is generally as good as, or better than, that provided by centrally controlled websites, Encyclopaedia Britannica and a psychiatry textbook.”

I'm not sure LL would be impressed. ;-)

I just cant take anything as fact from any blog. There seems to be no consequences when bloggers make facts up.

Its just gratifying to see how Wikipedia has resisted drift with the tides, and remains really quite reliable.

If Wikipedia was available when I was in high school and in college, it would have been amazing. I think because of the competition with so much free learning material now that textbook quality (at least in math and the sciences) seems to have increased markedly.

This conversation smacks of relativism. The facs are, in fact, the facts. Relativism is for people who are either incapable of understanding things or are on the losing side of an argument.