Internet , Google, Wikipedia and the rest, destroy or at least threaten the culture , despite the incredible amount of information they provide or maybe for this flood of information. It is a complex issue that must be addressed without catastrophic and nostalgic convictions of the iniquity of the times and without passive and joyful acquiescence to any bad habit general.

It isn’t 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 an accumulation of knowledge but the ability to critique and self-criticism , and passion. Culture , said Lin Yutang , is to love and hate with the foundation . It's strange to be impoverished rather than fearfully up to ridicule the information available, even the mere information without reflection.

There is no doubt that today you have the right fast tools of information, such as those offered by search engines . These are a great help in every things, they lightning provide information and data that we might otherwise gain only with a long, arduous and uncertain work. Like everyone else, happens also to me often to use and useful , albeit with the help of other people's material , to the search engines for the things I write about.

That information of course are still learning , but they’re 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 newspapers, no radio and tv , no internet .

In their book “La cultura si mangia” ( Bloomsbury ) Bruno Arpaia and Peter Greek cite impressive and comical examples of incredible ignorance. A deputy of the Pd of the last Parliament , when questioned on television about what a synagogue is , 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 about Jews. Another politician, question of who is Netanyahu responds , " the president of Iran ." The mechanism here is clear: he once will open a newspaper, he 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 Greek sympathize with the center , but to be fair they don’t spare the ignorance wherever they find it , of course, there are examples in their book so resounding that concern members of the center. Recently, Umberto Eco , on “Espresso” , he recalled how in the quiz , broadcast on 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 it 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 have taught and is buried Hannah Arendt, about 39 graduated only one knew who was Tito and nine did not know who Stalin was .

It is difficult to understand how this could happen , given that today is even easier and faster to know who Stalin was .

Perhaps today there is a great imbalance between supply and demand , especially in the cultural field. Very few people go to the library to ask for a book they’re real interest in, they 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 inflated and therefore sometimes also misleading. But even that really explains why the era of knowing everything you know less and less.

The first paragraph is an introduction about what the journalist is going to write.

Search engines are a great help in every things, they lightning provide information and data that we might otherwise gain only with a long, arduous and uncertain work. But they’re just the premise, and that information of course are still learning. In the 3^rd and 4^th there are some examples about people who are in ignorance, but they don’t fell shame about it. In the 5^th paragraph there are an example about ignorance of people that belong to the ruling class. In the 6^th paragraph there is the conclusion; very few people go to the library, and if they go, they don’t ask for a book they’re real interest in , they just go to the library with requests personally motivated .