Are books killing the oral tradition? The ability to recite long tracts from memory, from The Odyssey to bread recipes, has long been a marker of an educated mind. But what happens when facts can be looked up in a book?<p>"It's a damn shame" say out of work poets everywhere.
The article just barely touches on the main point: without general knowledge <i>in your head,</i> you can't put things into context.<p>One person cited in the article proposes that the trade-off is between learning to analyze vs. learning facts. That doesn't sound plausible, since facts are what you analyze and general background facts are the main things that enable you to analyze well.<p>The real trade-off is simply between <i>which</i> millions of facts people are learning as they grow up. The Internet, in the last 10 years or so, has pushed toward learning facts of immediate currency, like celebrity gossip and scandals and pop-culture memes. This is because the Internet continually dumps more information than anyone can take in, and the economy is based on competition for current attention.<p>The real shift is from contextual understanding to tactical skill, or you could say, from wisdom to immediate payoffs.
Answer: Google is killing many kinds of Trivia. For example, I always have to look up how to link external CSS.<p>Google is also teaching people more than ever (e.g. I know many more definitions of words than I ever would have looked up without Google). Google (more Wikipedia) gives me instant summaries of complex topics or figures or events, which I remember.
If anything, I know more now than I would have without Google. I tend to look up words and interesting facts I don't know on my palm when I am out and about and run into something I don't know much about.
I think 'general knowledge' is a moving target. Like any other power tool google changes your abilities to a different level, the brain cycles you were using before to remember things can now be applied to other items of interest.<p>Whether you do so or not is up to each individual.<p>A parallel development is the address book in mobile phones. I used know <i>all</i> the phone numbers of all my acquaintances by heart, now that my phone remembers them that 'skill' is absolutely atrophied.<p>The only phone number I remember now is my own...<p>If anything google is enabling people to find general knowledge, not kill it. The trick about information always was to be able to find it and use it, not necessarily to remember it, even though a good memory is obviously an asset.
Google is just a backing mechanism from which we can page-fault into memory. If we have to do it repeatedly, it'll end up in long-term memory, but that long-term working set of memory will be different for everybody, so the value of trying to teach it in school is somewhat lessened.<p>That's apart from school's other purposes, such as light introductions to topics you otherwise might not look into, and state-controlled cultural and political indoctrination.<p>In essence, Google / the web has added another layer to the human cache hierarchy, in between long-term memory and the written word (traditionally on paper and incoveniently non-colocated).
You know it's really crazy, but imagine how it will be in the future? What will it be like when we have some technology where it will be possible to get an answer from google in the space of a second no matter where you are?<p>We're getting close with cell phones but I'd say it might take about 20 seconds to get the answer. That's still a big enough barrier to keep you from asking it everything. But eventually we'll have some sort of device that will have us connected to information at all times. I don't know how it will manifest itself (wearable computers, maybe a wristwatch?) but it's surely coming.<p>I think it will be transformational.
There aren't many situations where I'd need information, without being able to look it up.<p>So it's not killed my general knowledge, it's expanded it beyond any level I could have had without it.
"...should schoolchildren be taught the capital of Colombia? "<p>Should bodybuilders lift weights?<p>Should basketball players run on off days?<p>OP never mentions what learning facts really is: exercise.<p>The purpose of education isn't to know the capital of Columbia. The purpose of education is to learn. Which requires exercise. Just like the body, the mind needs exercise, too.<p>There are as many ways to exercise the mind as the body, some better than others. Like taking the elevator, using a search engine may get you the answer faster, but not much mental muscle is built.