Because we have been so ignorant
Google, Wikipedia and the Net: the culture is threatened by an excess of information
It is said that Internet, Google, Wikipedia and so on destroy or threaten the culture, although the incredible quantity of information that offer or maybe due of that information’s flood. It is a complex issue, it needs to be addressed without catastrophic and wistful blames of badness of the time and without a passive and merry acquiescence to any bad habit general. It is not strange that culture can be weakened by an excess of information that prevents you to select and reflect and embarrasses the time of the authentic culture, which is not accumulation of knowledge but the ability to critique and self-criticism, passion and distance. Lin Yutang said that culture is to love and hate with foundation. It is strange to be impoverished rather than fearfully up to ridicule the information avaible, even the mere information without reflection.
There is no doubt that today you have the right tools incredibly fast with information, such as those offered by search engines. There are a great help in all things, provide lightning information and data that might otherwise gain only with a long, arduous and uncertain work. As everyone else, happens to me too often to use and useful, albeit with the help of other people’s material, to the search engines for the things I write. That information, of course, they are still learning, but I’m the premise. But strangely today is the information to regress fearfully, as if, instead of having tools so functional, we lived in a world without communication, no books, no newspaper, no radio and tv, no internet.
In their book La cultura si mangia (Guanda) Bruno Arpaia and Pietro Greco cite impressive and comical examples af incredible ignorance. A deputy of the Democratic Party of the last Parliament, when questioned on television about what a synagogue, she replied: “it is the place where Muslim women go to pray to their God”. Fifty, maybe a hundred years ago, even an illiterate person would have known almost, albeit crudely, that the synagogue has to do with the Jews. Another politician, to the question of who is Netanyahu responds “Iran’s president”. The mechanism here is clear: she will open a newspaper, she will have seen a headline in large letters “Netanyahu protest with Iran” or things like that, and then in his head the two terms are associated, such as straw, hay, right, left in the exercises of conscripts a century ago.
Arpaia and Greco sympathize with the center-left, but to be fair that do not spare the ignorance wherever they find it, of course, there are examples in their book so resounding that concern members of the center-right. Recently, Umberto Eco, on “Espresso”, recalled how in the quiz, broadcast an primetime TV, some people listed with name, proved to believe that Mussolini was still alive at the end of the Eighties or Nineties.
The trouble perhaps worse is that these people do not have fled into the desert to hide the shame of being caught in such inconceivable ignorance, perhaps even have been flattered to have appeared, albeit with ridicule, on TV. But they can console themselves, because they are in good company in the world.
It is often the ruling class or the one that you believe that or destined to become one, crowding the pews reserved for pupils with donkey ears. A young woman from a Jewish family, whose great-grandparents died in a concentration camp, showed very vaguely know who was Hitler. When I was teaching at Bard College, a great American college where Hannah Arendt taught and is buried, about 39 graduated only one knew who Tito was and nine did not know who Stalin was.
Perhaps today there is a great imbalance between supply and demand, especially in the cultural field. Very few go to the library to ask for a book to their real interest, just go to the library with requests personally motivated. Usually you go to ask what is powerfully offered, and the search engines assume an initiative of the consumer, he or she will assume that you have to ask the question, although often respond in turn by downloading an offer inflates and therefore sometimes also misleading. But even that really explains why the era of knowing everything you know less and less.