With technology giving us easy access to information nowadays, we can learn as much as we want whenever and wherever we are as long as we have data in our gadgets. How amazing our world kept revolving from how it used to be during the time of our predecessors when they had to travel miles away from their homes to libraries seeking knowledge.
This era is different; whatever information that interests us can easily be gotten; however, does that make us more knowledgeable, intelligent, or smarter than our predecessors? In this post, I will share my thoughts about this subject matter...
Easy access to knowledge I can say it is a blessing, and the blessing is the ease of accessibility. Whenever we need any information, such information can be gotten through the Internet and via our gadgets; also, we get access to such information quicker and faster, right? . However, it's also a curse, and the curse part is that the information we get as such sometimes is not complete or is not completely true. Sometimes, it's just people's opinion we are getting and not the scientific fact. There is a mix-up of information over one subject matter, which in some cases has led people to misinformation. So it now starts creating false information and other things that can stem from it.
So the easy access to knowledge we enjoy in this era doesn't really make us more knowledgeable, and the reason is because we get information faster but NOT DEEPER! If I need research on something, I just go to Google, and it's easy for me to just get all the cheap information posted over there and at ease even from the comfort of my bed. No form of critical thinking, no stress, no effort, and in some cases, the ease of access to information we enjoy could even hinder true memorization, unlike our predecessors who took their time working on a particular access to acquiring such knowledge.
It's different from when we go to the library and consult a book written by somebody or articles someone has written about his findings and all that, and then do something like a meta-analysis, bringing in a lot of articles written about the book and drawing inferences. You see, it's not like we are more knowledgeable; we just have ease of accessibility.
It doesn't also give us an edge to be smarter than our predecessors. If you look at it holistically, the things we do with commitments, time, and investment yield a better result than the haphazard information we access on the Internet.
Wrapping up, easy access to information is a blessing as well as a curse. It makes us get information faster but not necessarily deeper, and thirdly, we are not smarter than our predecessors.
My thought is that the easy access to information or education we have today does not necessarily make us more knowledgeable as compared to our predecessors that had to source information and get a lot of inferences from authors and researchers. Even though it was tedious for them back then, they had better depth of knowledge of a lot of the things they were exposed to, unlike us with the fast and easy access to knowledge but without the guarantee that we are learning more effectively and thinking more critically.
This is my response to the #hivelearners community contest on the topic titled, Is Easy Access A Blessing?
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