The Information age- are we better off?

The ‘information age’ has empowered us hugely, or has it?

James Garfield, US president in the late 19th century once said “Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.”

The information age has surrounded us with a convergence of technology and information the like of which the world has never seen. More people have access to more knowledge and information than at any time in human history- surely therefore, ‘popular education’ in the truest sense (not just people going to school, but people having free access to culture and learning) should, in parallel, be at its apogee. And if popular education is at its most advanced, then freedom and justice should be prevalent all over of the world, right?

Of course this is not the case. But why? Particularly when you consider how freely accessible knowledge is. Consider the following:

• The average newspaper contains more information in a week than a 17th century person would have consumed in a lifetime
• The majority of American children now go online before they can functionally read
• The number of people who learned English in China last year outnumbered those who speak English as a first language in the rest of the world put together
• People are creating and sharing information on an unprecedented scale. A University of Berkeley study reported that in 2002 humankind created 5 exabytes of stored data (print, film, computer data)- the equivalent of 500,000 libraries of congress EVERY YEAR. there are 50 million blogs on the internet, and the that number is doubling every 6 months; Wikipedia, the web-based encyclopedia compiled by users has over 2 million articles.
• Google, where much of the world’s knowledge is indexed and made accessible has more computer servers than there were computers in the world in 1970

But is all this knowledge actually enriching us? My fear is that this huge advance is not being accompanied by actual cultural development, for several reasons: 1) There are political and cultural groups who fear this democracy of information- the Chinese government are a prime example- all of the major internet search engines having famously had to censor their results- a search on ‘Tiananmen square’ on Google China will not pull any references to the 1989 massacre Conversely there are plenty of groups seeking to utilise the information highway to destroy freedom and justice- cults, fundamentalist groups, terrorist, etc.
2) A large population of the world does not have access to the information superhighway- poverty still disenfranchises through preventing popular education in all senses.

However one can reasonably expect humanity to continue to triumph, or improve its record on these 2 issues: Just as Soviet Russia crumbled, China will have to embrace some form of democracy- (in the 2nd decade of this century their youth working demographic will shift against them- leaving them probably not enough young people to sustain their current economic growth- huge social/cultural change will be needed); fundamentalism and extremism ultimately destroy themselves; and global poverty is at an all time low thanks, in principal, to the rise of China and India as economic powers.

However my concern is not so much with those who are being PREVENTED from accessing the information age, as the decline of those who ARE. A sage once said that the danger with the technology revolution was not that computers would become more human, but that humans would become more like computers.

And ultimately, the reality of the information age is that it’s a product of computer mechanisation on a huge scale- with relatively few humans involved- as opposed to a collective human development. Google may have made the world’s knowledge universally accessible, but that doesn’t mean that people are consuming it. Look around you, and you see a society perpetually plugged in and switched on- play stations, mobile phones, Blackberries, laptops, ipods. But are the people at the end of these devices more knowledgeable, more culturally informed? Or are they merely outsourcing their entertainment to ‘the network’? Has the information age enriched us, or have we have become flesh-based hard disk drives?

Consider this parable: When at boarding school I remember hearing the poem of the Ancient Mariner on the radio. It transfixed me and desperately sought it to read it. Now this was in 1986, so if I wanted to read this poem for myself, I had to go find it in the school library. The problem was it wasn’t there-the volume of the Oxford Companion of 18th century verse had mysteriously disappeared (like so much else at my school). So, I had to wait 5 days for the weekly minibus trip to the nearest town, when I was able to borrow it from the public library. The anticipation of that trip, of actually getting the poem was so great that when finally in my hands, I devoured it over and over again, and can still recite much of it to this day. The point being, the THRILL of this discovery was in the CHASE. Nowadays, I need only tap ‘Ancient Mariner’ into Google and up it pops- no challenge at all. But the problem with this is that, knowing that so much information is at our fingertips, I think we don’t seek it out, safe in the comfort that it’s available if we want it. The comfort of the availability of information can, if we’re not careful, turn us from thrilled seekers to passive receivers.

And when you look behind some of the startling figures above, the realities are somewhat different: a relatively small percentage of the Wikipedia community actually edit and contribute- the majority passively view. Similarly, Technorati estimate that of 100 people engaged in a blog, on average 1 will create original posts; 9 will supply comments whilst 90 will passively view.

My point is that the huge democracy of information is actually being utilised and originated by a comparatively small bunch of people. The majority are either passively receiving, or using the advancements to make their lives EASIER not RICHER. Glass Bead Gamers will not be content with using the information age as a comfort-blanket of ANSWERS; they will utilise its power to ask vital QUESTIONS. And the more people who utilise it in this way, the more popular education, freedom and justice will truly advance.

So, we must rejoice in our new democracy, but not forget to vote! Lest we become idle and immobilised on the sea of human knowledge- like the Ancient Mariner:

Day after day, day after day
We stuck, nor rythme nor motion
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean