With the Internet came information, and lots of it. You can Google almost anything and you will probably get a result, or something close to what you were looking for. The accessibility and speed of websites allows us to find what we want and need in an instant, and if something is incorrect, we can quickly update it. And schools have caught on as well, even using iPads IN THE CLASSROOM. Seriously, high school must be awesome now.
But with all of this information, it can be difficult to figure out what’s true and what’s just plain made up. You’ve probably heard about the whole “vaccinations-are-causing-autism” fiasco, which is gaining more and more attention. If you haven’t, you should check it out. But what I’m getting at is the fact that the benefits of the Internet are also its drawbacks; we have easy access to so many many texts, blogs, and posts that it’s hard for laymen in a particular field to figure out what’s true and what isn’t. And this must piss off a lot of academics.
I mean think about it. If you’re a person who has spent their entire life devoted to studying animals, and some guy out of no where talks about the existence of the donkey-dragon, you’d probably laugh at first, thinking that the man just ripped the idea from Shrek or something. But then you slowly realize that his website has a massive following, and all of the people commenting on the front page, who are trying to warn people of the idiotic nature of such an idea, are all getting down-voted and blocked from the site. So how did it come to this? Well it’s a little fallacy that we all commit, and that some of us commit more frequently – the confirmation bias.
You see we all have an idea of what is true in our heads, so we tend to select evidences that support what we already think is true, and toss out everything else. So if people already believe that donkeys and dragons can mate (or want to believe in such a thing, which would be pretty cool and disgusting and awesome I must admit), they are going to search for information that supports the existence of such fire-breathing, load-bearing creatures. Even if a scholar in the field of biology presented clear proofs against the theory of donko-dragonian evolution, most of the people on donkeydragonsarerealfoshoscrewhaters.com would probably just ignore them. The Internet has given us the ability to filter out real knowledge in favor of false information that supports our beliefs, and to some extent, we all do it.
This doesn’t mean that academics are completely forgotten online. I mean many universities have open courses that give a college education for free online, and organizations like Khan Academy are doing an amazing job actually teaching people real skills with quick videos. It just means that, in an ever-expanding online world, people with knowledge have to shout a little louder than the rest of us.
Arman is Awesome 