Dumb and Dumber

By Ada Mina

How accessible is knowledge?

The Internet has made things accessible but even everything else isn't as accessible as intended, sometimes certain entries are more common or at least more easily found in other languages. Similar to my work on the pecuilarities of foreign languages and how they reflect (and effect) the perception of things, almost any valuable knowledge might turn up as obscure and indecipherable. Perhaps the new anti-intellectualism might have more to do with being unable to have access to obscure and unpopular but potentially valuable and interesting data.

1980s and even 1990s Internet culture was like, hoarding and recounting potentially lost data through emails and Usenet like discussion groups. Even many early html websites were like that, when many other people like myself had access to CD-Roms in that period. That kind of information was hard to come by not just because of the limited Internet connection as anybody in this age has gone through dialup at some point or another but also because not many people had computers back then and fewer still knew how to operate them for personal use.

While Wikipedia, broadband, blogs and message boards have made it easy to gain access to media you also have websites with their domains expired and some of them aren't even archived at all, so whatever data they might have is lost for good unless if there's a mirror or copy of it somewhere. That isn't to say that the new generation of geeks aren't any smarter or dumber though a better way to describe their brand of anti-intellectualism  is being a byproduct of being spoilt. They're spoilt by a lot of media they grew up with.

So many of them don't bother learning, keeping and teaching. Or at least some of them do but it proves my point about how the new anti-intellectualism has come to disregard its own precedents. Without anybody else to recount something of interest, people would repeat the same mistakes again and some data will never see the light of their day.