None of us can carry so much as a pair of scissors or our knitting needles on to an aircraft these days, but in recent times I’ve been carrying with me everywhere, even on aircraft, a loaded, pointed, sharpened dangerous idea. It is that the internet, like youth itself, is wasted on the young, the very creatures whose natural habitat it is thought to be.
Every year Edge: The World Question Centre puts a question to members of a flock of fine thinkers. This year’s question, put to 119 agile minds (one of them belonging to Australia’s Professor Paul Davies), is: What Is Your Dangerous Idea? The resulting socially, morally or emotionally dangerous 75,000 words of their essays make for stimulating reading.
The dangerous idea contributed by David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale University and chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, is that the so-called Information Age isn’t dispensing any information.
‘What are people well informed about in this Information Age?’ he asks. He muses that perhaps in this Information Age (beginning in 1982 with the invention of the internet and the personal computer, but really breaking into a gallop in these present times) the only things anyone is better informed about are video games.
He says that while he’s not sure what’s happening in ‘scholarship in general’ in his field, science, average folk seem to know less than they did in 1985. He suspects people knew more about science in ’65 than they did in ’85.
‘What if,’ he challenges, ‘people have been growing steadily more ignorant ever since the so-called Information Age began?’
Professor Gelernter is being polemical—trying to prod our minds. Mine fancies that he may be quite wrong and that this Information Age, perhaps wasted on the young, may be the heyday of the thinking fogey.
Gelernter’s point of view is at the intellectual end of the common feeling among unthinking fogeys that the internet is an overwhelmingly anti-intellectual environment and only a kind of global psychic fair or porn supermarket.
But I, being 60 and quite well read and interested in the arts and ideas, begin to find the internet an indispensable tool of the thinking, feeling life. Here is an illustration of what I mean.
Just seven days before sitting down to begin this essay and stumbling about my rented apartment in Melbourne very early one morning, hurrying to get ready for work, I