But – at least in my experience – undergraduate university students still exhibit many of the educational conceits of prior decades. That is, although they retain information perfectly well, they often have a limited capacity to manipulate it in any meaningful way.
Of course, gifted students will continue to do well, as they have always done. But those other students – perhaps less gifted, or having had fewer opportunities – appear to be unaware of, and unfamiliar with, the shifting informational landscape.
Mere retention has never been sufficient to achieve academic excellence and now, with the informational ubiquity afforded to us by smartphones, tablet computers and netbooks, it is even less relevant.
But although students are no longer burdened by the requirement to remember (catalysing the aforementioned “Google effect”), other pedagogical demands make themselves known.
In his 1941 short story “The Library of Babel” Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges asked us to imagine a library that contains all possible books of 410 pages, written in a language with 23 letters, spaces and punctuation marks (somewhere in the region of 251,312,000 volumes).
Although the system has maximal information, the librarians live in a state of near-suicidal despair – their task is vast and impossible, because something with maximal information content also has zero information content, at least as expressed as a ratio of signal-to-noise.
Of course, the state of the internet is nowhere near as dire, but the story does serve to illustrate the quandary that informational ubiquity presents for both learners and educators.
It is unquestionable that the internet has facilitated the spread of information more than any invention since the printing press. But greater ease of both creation and transmission means it is easier to spread information that is spurious, misleading or just plain incorrect (see the otherwise inexplicable staying power of “wind turbine syndrome”). The signal-to-noise ratio has suffered in favour of the latter.
It is hardly a novel observation that there is a lot of garbage on the internet. But phenomena such as the Birther Movement – those who believe Barack Obama was born outside the US and is therefore ineligible for the presidency – only serve to demonstrate the need to reappraise the way we teach students to navigate informational topographies.
It is a truism that a dedicated internet user can find something to support their views no matter how ridiculous they are – a phenomenon that many, I suspect, would consider undesirable.
People of course have the freedom to believe whatever they like. Problems emerge, however, when they expect their views to actually reflect the world as it is – something that, for instance, conservative media in the US are now grappling with in the aftermath of a resounding Obama victory.
Although I do not share Carr’s pessimistic view that heavy reliance upon the internet will be detrimental to humanity as a whole, I do believe greater emphasis needs to be placed upon the teaching of incredulity, given the ease with which ostensibly credible misinformation can be accessed.
Although we already attempt to imbue our students with a degree of hard-headed cynicism with respect to sourcing information, our attempts thus far have plainly been marginally inadequate at least.
Ryan Wittingslow is a PhD student in Film and Philosophy at University of Sydney.
This article was first published at The Conversation.
