To know things and to know OF things

Access to information has never been greater than it is right now, so why does it feel like we aren't any more knowledgeable?

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A few weeks ago I had a rather embarrassing moment that I will blame on my suburbanite millennial proclivities:

While walking through my neighborhood one day I came across an interaction between a rabbit and a crow. I usually don’t stop to watch animals, but for some reason I found this interaction interesting- the rabbit would hop towards the crow, which would immediately hop back.

This interaction went on for quite a bit of time and was usually interrupted with extended moments of stillness before the hopping continued.

Unfortunately, this is where my critical thinking failed me, as for some reason my immediate thought when seeing this course of events was to make this ridiculous assumption that this random rabbit and crow were playing a little game of hoppity hop. I started thinking of those YouTube videos of random, unorthodox animals being lifetime friends and hanging out.

Fortunately as I walked away my critical thinking faculties kicked in and I immediately came to a different conclusion- the crow was likely hoping to feast on bunny meat, only being stopped by some mommy or daddy rabbit.

Again, it’s rather embarrassing that a more appropriate conclusion was not the first thing that came to my mind, although I suppose that’s typical of people my generation.

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There’s never been another point in time where the dissemination of information has been as quick, widespread, and voluminous as it has been in our current era. Even with all of the fraught brought on by the pandemic the ability to access hundreds of open access journals has allowed people who may have never been interested in science a window into how science, loosely speaking works and operates.

And yet, at the same time this abundance of information doesn’t seem to translate into more learned or knowledgeable individuals. It seems as if we have more information but not more people interested in this information. And if so, it’s not through typical means such as research but rather through whatever gets passed through social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram which may provide any bit of information, whether true or completely falsified, be spread to millions of users.

Now, before anyone makes any allegations of censorship it’s not really the fact that all sorts of bad information and conspiracies are online that’s my problem. Rather, it’s the fact that many social media users seem to lack critical thinking skills or complex thought so that they can understand whether they should show some reservation in just believing whatever they say.

It’s goes along with the notion that we wouldn’t have an industry of fact-checkers if people bothered to check information themselves.

Because of this we seem to be having a growing number of people who only gain superficial knowledge of topics or ideas, not even wading the waters and seeing what other information can be out there.