I think we are in the process of forgetting a lot of the things we used to know. The irony is that everything is recorded and stored in someway nowadays. With this constant storage and compiling we don’t think we are forgetting anything. It feels like knowledge is readily accessible and that we are in no danger. However, this is far from the truth.
Imagine a room filled with paper. There are sheets of it everywhere. Every sheet has some historical significance. Every page offers some truth about the world we live in. Every page is relevant is some way.
Now a lot of this information isn’t something that particularly interests you. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t important. But you walk over the pages and throw them to the side. You search for something that you want.
You search and search. You flip through pages and pages of material hoping that the next page will give you something. If not, you quit.
Do you ever feel like that?
I know that I do. Sometimes while doing a web search, I come up empty. I waste tonnes of time and never find anything remotely close to what I wanted. I give up and create the material for my classroom myself or I just move on to a different topic.
I wish there was a better way to find information on the World Wide Web. I haven’t found it yet. Search engines will often let me down. I know the information is out there but if I can’t find it, it’s pretty much useless.
If the knowledge is there but lost, isn’t it like we have forgotten it. Does that make sense?