Imagine an intellectually curious but poor high schooler: They can't afford to buy journal articles and books; they have almost no option to access serious, quality information. How much potential is lost to this travesty?
We've fallen far, far short of the potential and dream of the Internet and the democratization of knowledge, and the state of things has become a norm; few even notice it or realize what they are missing.
The truly valuable knowledge, to a great extent, still is inaccessible to the vast majority of the world. It is in books and academic journals. As a simple example beyond Google Books, I was thinking the other day that Safari Books by itself contains much more valuable knowledge (and far less misinformation) on many technical issues than the rest of the Internet; I learn more about some topics in a few hours on Safari Books than in a year on the Internet.
Technically, books and journals easily could be made universally accessible, creating an explosion of knowledge and all the things knowledge enables and motivates - the Enlightenment, science, technology, democracy, liberty, prosperity, most of modern civilization, etc. Instead of being well-informed, most of humanity is left with the dregs, and instead of the Internet providing an explosion of knowledge it has created a plague of misinformation and propaganda. IMHO the lack of high quality knowledge also robs the public of the ability to discriminate between good and bad information: Most lack a model of what quality knowledge is, of even the questions to ask (something encountered frequently in serious scholarship). Few even realize the vast gulf between the quality of generally available information and what is in the books and journals. (I'll add that the demise of bookstores means few even see or are aware that the books exist.) And even if they know, it's inaccessible.
Instead of embracing a technological revolution in the distribution of information - a turning point in the history of humanity - we have brought forward the model used for the old technology, with distribution as controlled and limited as the old medium of paper. For the most part, it seems like the same few people have the quality information, the professional scholars. Let's not forget and give up; it's too important.
> We've fallen far, far short of the potential and dream of the Internet and the democratization of knowledge, and the state of things has become a norm; few even notice it or realize what they are missing.
Actually, the Internet has made this go backwards.
Most libraries had basic books on most subjects. And they could get other books as required.
Now, you can't find those basic books anymore on the shelves. "Oh, we can order that, it will be here in a week." Well, that's great, except that the book you ordered isn't a basic one. Oops. Well, there goes another week ...
And, even worse, computer stuff from about 1985-1996 probably isn't online. One of my humorous moments was watching a "Millenial" have to fix a VB6 program. The fact that the information he needed wasn't anywhere on the web gobsmacked the poor boy.
I didn't mean that that people aren't aware that such things as books exist, which of course would be absurd.
I meant that people aren't aware of the serious and scholarly books that exist because they don't experience the serendipity[0] of seeing them in particular, or en masse, in the bookstore.
[0] IIRC, serendipity is actually part of the design of library arrangement systems (Library of Congress, Dewey, etc.): Books are arranged so that you will happen across related information when you look for the book you came for.
This point cannot be overstated right now. Recommendation systems like Amazon's are terrible for book discovery compared to looking at the rest of the shelf when you are getting a book at a library. There is a popular sentiment that the Internet has made knowledge discovery easier than going to the library, which in my experience is absolutely misleading, and is causing people to wrongly believe they have done research on a subject when in fact they have completely overlooked a giant corpus of published material.
> Pretty much every job gives you a book (policy manual) when you get hired.
Whoa whoa whoa, you are painting with broad strokes here. Most businesses are small businesses, and most of those have a handful of guidelines at best, even when you get above a dozen employees.
In the mid-size bracket of businesses, I know 300 employee businesses with no proper policy manual.
My apologies, every company I've ever worked for (even the one person cobbler shop I worked at in high school) gave me one, so I guess this example was anecdotal.
I've worked at a few businesses, and the closest I ever got to a booklet with rules was toward the end of my first job, where they tried to ban sharing of salaries and quite a few other things. Ended up calling L&I to address the illicit policy and quit a few months later.
We've fallen far, far short of the potential and dream of the Internet and the democratization of knowledge, and the state of things has become a norm; few even notice it or realize what they are missing.
The truly valuable knowledge, to a great extent, still is inaccessible to the vast majority of the world. It is in books and academic journals. As a simple example beyond Google Books, I was thinking the other day that Safari Books by itself contains much more valuable knowledge (and far less misinformation) on many technical issues than the rest of the Internet; I learn more about some topics in a few hours on Safari Books than in a year on the Internet.
Technically, books and journals easily could be made universally accessible, creating an explosion of knowledge and all the things knowledge enables and motivates - the Enlightenment, science, technology, democracy, liberty, prosperity, most of modern civilization, etc. Instead of being well-informed, most of humanity is left with the dregs, and instead of the Internet providing an explosion of knowledge it has created a plague of misinformation and propaganda. IMHO the lack of high quality knowledge also robs the public of the ability to discriminate between good and bad information: Most lack a model of what quality knowledge is, of even the questions to ask (something encountered frequently in serious scholarship). Few even realize the vast gulf between the quality of generally available information and what is in the books and journals. (I'll add that the demise of bookstores means few even see or are aware that the books exist.) And even if they know, it's inaccessible.
Instead of embracing a technological revolution in the distribution of information - a turning point in the history of humanity - we have brought forward the model used for the old technology, with distribution as controlled and limited as the old medium of paper. For the most part, it seems like the same few people have the quality information, the professional scholars. Let's not forget and give up; it's too important.