The madman on the street corner Internet

My grandmother spent much of later years watching television. A lot of what she saw evoked discontent, including University Challenge. When a student failed to answer a question, she would say: “These people are at university. They should know everything”. This assumption that people could possess universal knowledge, strange as it is now, was once common. Parents bought encyclopaedias for their children, in the hope that this would give them access to the entire world of knowledge. My parents were no exception, and I spent many happy hours accumulating information from the ten volumes of my home encyclopaedia. As a result, I possess a wide span of superficial knowledge, together with a sense that I lack real expertise in any field at all. I have come to realise that, despite all my reading over the past 70 years, I am still strikingly ignorant about many things.

One consolation in my despair is the realisation that I am not alone. Most people, I suspect, know a great deal about their own lives and the lives of their family and friends. They have probably built up some expertise in their own line of work, and know a lot about the community they live in and the sports and other activities they enjoy. But compared to the great body of human knowledge, this amounts to very little. As a result, the human race floats on a vast tide of ignorance. This has implications for how our societies function, particularly since the expansion of the Internet in the 1980s. Before then, it was generally assumed that knowledge was hard-won, and thus mainly possessed by people who had spent years in education or vocational training. People were therefore inclined to respect experts and people with technical or academic qualifications.

Now, information and opinion is available almost instantly, usually with pictures. People can easily post to the entire world their own opinions or circulate those made by other people of which they approve. This can be immensely useful when information is posted by people about things they know. I have saved hours of otherwise-wasted effort by watching videos made by (usually middle-aged) tradesmen explaining how to fix cars, decorate the house, or do gardening. Unfortunately, the great bulk of opinion on the Internet is not of this kind. Since most people are ignorant of most things, the Internet has become the prime medium for circulating ignorance. Because it comes from a computer, this ignorance is treated with especial reverence. Now, millions of people in the USA repeat the bizarre paranoid inventions of websites like Qanon which, in days gone by, would probably have led to admission to mental hospital. The madman shouting obscenities on the street corner has become the guru of our age.