We all love the convenience of looking for answers immediately and having “google” in our pockets. My dad, in his eighties, said, “People don’t really need to know anything anymore because they can just google it.” What a wise statement from a pre-Internet veteran. We have digital assistants on our devices to help us remember important things and manage our time. We are free of the burdon of having to remember small things and instead access and share information nonstop on a global scale.
A generation of citizens is emerging who have never known life without a networked mobile device with instant access to information. With that convenience comes the sacrifice of time to reflect and the guarantee of accuracy and quality of the hits we receive.
An information literacy colleague, Esther Grassian, advocates the need for Information Literacy and explains why it is a big deal. Information literacy is not simply an academic term– it is an understanding of our current culture in networked society.
A friend posted an insightful quote on Facebook which I noticed had been liked and shared by many but without any attribution to a creator. I asked if she knew the source and she replied, “People share these things all the time now and nobody ever really knows where they came from.” I find it perplexing that this smart and tech-savvy young woman would simply shrug off intellectual property with a “Who knows? Who cares?” attitude.
In BEYOND THE BLOGOSPHERE by Aaron Barlow, we are given the image of the Internet as a “book of sand” in which nobody knows the origin of ideas. They are washed out to sea and scattered along the beach.
If we really don’t care about information literacy in the future, there will be a high price to pay. Idiocracy might be a concept too difficult for the citizens of the future to comprehend. The fear of artificial intelligence evolving into consciousness pales in comparison to the glimpse of human beings shrugging off any desire to acquire knowledge simply because easy access and quick apps have made it irrelevant.