Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Yes, Another Bill Keller of the New York Times Edition
Carlos Slim to the white courtesy phone, please: if you want a chance of getting any of your investment out alive, you need to make some changes...
Dylan Matthews watches today's Bill Keller dirigible explosion, and comments: "Of all social maladies people want to pin on the Internet, "people not knowing enough things" is probably the least plausible I've heard floated."
Dylan:
You can be an expert if you try: For the most part, Bill Keller's latest column reads like a typical entry in the "the Internet's making us stupid!" genre, but this seems like an odd problem for him to single out....
Until the 15th century, people were taught to remember vast quantities of information. Feats of memory that would today qualify you as a freak — the ability to recite entire books — were not unheard of. Then along came the Mark Zuckerberg of his day, Johannes Gutenberg.... The capacity to remember prodigiously still exists... but for most of us it stays parked in the garage...
Dylan continues:
Keller is not opposed to the invention of movable type, but he seems to think the Internet is taking us across some kind of tipping point where we start to remember less and less useful information.... The idea that the Internet is reducing the amount of raw information people can memorize is frankly bizarre. The average reader of this blog has a depth of knowledge about American government that would be extremely rare a couple decades ago...
