Ó wg4wp4 The end of general knowledge? In what ways could you find out: 1 how to kayak? 2 the capital of Burkina Faso? 3 biographical data about a person for a research project? 4 about disabled facilities at a particular hotel? 5 how to get to your destination when travelling by car? Read the start of an article about technology and general knowledge. 1 Why do you think the mistake happened? 2 Whose fault do you think it was? Reading 1 2 a One day a middle-aged man asked a taxi to take him to see Chelsea play Arsenal at football. He told the driver “Stamford Bridge”, the name of Chelsea’s stadium, but he delivered him instead to the village of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, nearly 150 miles in the opposite direction. Of course, he missed the match. What point is the journalist making? What do you think he will go on to say? Read the next part to check. b What had happened? The man in this story had handed over responsibility for knowing geography to a machine. With the satnav system in place, he felt that he did not need to know where he was going. That was the machine’s job. He confidently outsourced the job of knowing this information, or of finding it out, to that little computer on the dashboard … Is that what the future holds for us? Using an internet search engine (once you have keyed the words in) takes less than a second, and the process will only get quicker. And these days, with our smartphones at hand, almost all of us are online almost all of the time. The same could be true of university education. Today, the average student seems not to value general knowledge. If asked a factual question, they will usually click on a search engine or online encyclopaedia without a second thought. Actually knowing the fact and committing it to memory does not seem to be an issue, it’s the ease with which we can look it up. However, general knowledge has never been something that you acquire formally. Instead, we pick it up from all sorts of sources as we go along, often absorbing facts without realising. The question remains, then: is the internet threatening general knowledge? When I put that to Moira Jones, expert in designing IQ tests, she referred me to the story of the Egyptian god Thoth. I looked it up. It was told by Plato 2,400 years ago. It goes like this: Thoth invents writing and proudly offers it as a gift to the king of Egypt, declaring it an ‘elixir of memory and wisdom’. But the king is horrified, and tells him: “This invention will induce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, because they will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written. Writing is not a remedy for memory, but for reminding them of what they have discovered.” 62 5 Unit It’s an online world write a report talk about copyright and piracy explain how to do something write an online article Goals talk about knowledge and technology discuss how to access information write a blog comment talk about learning computer skills Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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