Have you ever wondered how fast the pace of change really is? Have you had time to wonder?
The old saying is “knowledge is power”. From the earliest vestiges of mankind, through the middle ages and beyond, knowledge has been used for means of control. Those in power such as monarchs, politicians, and religious purveyors all used the ability to impart and disseminate knowledge to keep their position over the masses.
The chief tool used to accomplish this was the ability to read and write. The working class were kept uneducated, and their ability to congregate and share what they knew, and to become organised suffered greatly.
However, this has changed dramatically. In this day and age reading and writing is learned by almost all in first world countries, and is not the barrier it used to be. In fact, now the problem is not that information is scarce, but that there is so much of it, and sorting through it all is time consuming, and confusing.
With so many sources of information, and the World Wide Web giving so many the ability to communicate one to one and one to many, the issue has moved from a dearth of information to an overload, with much doubt cast on the validity or otherwise of this mass of words and pictures, still and otherwise. Pictures are ‘touched up’, documents are forged, statements are made that are so difficult to verify and validate.
Everywhere we look today there is more information than we could ever hope to process. Whilst the numbers in the video above have been bandied about in various places, this clip packages them together neatly, and is cause for thought. How can we ever begin to know what is real, what is important, what is relevant, and when will it end?
The part that stood out for me is that half of what is learnt in the first year of a four year technical degree is outdated by year three. What figure(s) made you sit up and think?