Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends' doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is.Wrong. Focus is important, but no job above the level of, say, raking leaves could be performed with even minimal competency by an ignorant person who merely has access to Google. If you know nothing of automobiles, can you rebuild an engine just by Googling the answer? If you know nothing about nuclear physics, can you help design a nuclear power plant by Googling the answer? If you haven't been to medical school (and believe me, this involves gargantuan amounts of memorization of tedious facts), can you perform heart surgery by Googling the answer? If you haven't been to law school (more tedious memorization), can you argue a Supreme Court case by using Google?
To be sure, the Internet can make someone who already has a broad base of memorized knowledge slightly more competent, by reminding them of a forgotten fact or enlightening them as to a new fact that they can fit into their pre-existing base of memorized knowledge. But it's absurd to suggest that the need for a "large body of knowledge" has disappeared and been replaced by Google along with "critical thinking skills."
I agree with your points, in addition to which I'd add that there is still the problem of immediacy of access. Fast as Google is, if I had to do a search every time I needed access to a fact pertinent to my job(s), I'd spend my whole day searching. Instant recall is critical not only in terms of brute efficiency, but also in terms of effectively relating facts to other facts to model relevant decision trees, action plans, outcomes, etc.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post. I wrote a post about the importance of memorization here - check it out if you are interested: http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/09/art-of-memorization.html
ReplyDeleteAn excerpt: "Memorization gets a bad rap in education circles, but it remains a fact of life for students and adults in many settings: anatomy and other subjects in pre-medical or medical school; "black-letter" legal rules and terminology in law school; dates and locations in undergraduate history survey courses; the names and dates of artworks in art history courses; and vocabulary and grammatical structures in the study of world languages.
In the professional world, there is an acute need to remember names and faces: all of your networking will come to naught if you can't remember anyone's name. And if you are a K-12 teacher, you are expected to learn something like 150 new names within the first week or two of each school year."