Knowing

April 4, 2016

Greetings from the best results,

What is the capitol of Scotland?

Anything worth knowing, and a vast morass of things not worth knowing, is available to you within seconds.  Assuming you can provide the initiative to type in a few key words in a search engine.

What has developed with this access to information is a change in the way we ‘know’ things.  It is a blessing and a curse.  Seeing the world through search results gives us a limited dimension of what we seek.  Even really good results, with video and gifs and graphs and links to blogs, we will only know so much of what we see in any meaningful way.

Some months ago I went to the library.  It is the same library I studied at when I was in high school, a twenty minute drive from where I am sitting right now.  It is an inconvenient distance if I just wanted to look up the definition of ‘rotogravure’.   

The library has an environment.  It smells of paper and the dust of other paper and of people.  There are worn steps from thousands of seekers, the wood places are shiny from hands, the shelves scratched and scuffed from books removed and replaced and removed.   If you go to get a book, you get more than a result, you get an experience.  If you have a question you get more than an answer, you get a relationship.

I use this as an example of the spectrum available to us.  I believe we are lucky to be in a time when so much of the world is available to us, and at the same time I wonder if it changes us in ways we may not comprehend until it is too hard to change back. 

I can type in an address in my phone and get directions to wherever I want to go.  This is an amazing help to me, saving time and frustration.  But there is value in understanding where you are going; orienting yourself in the world and making your way from where you are to the place you want to be.  You cannot get the same experience looking at your phone.  You often learn more, absorb more, by being lost and then unlost, than you would getting turn by turn directions. 

I know that this is a fundamental way the brain operates.  If you want to know something well, you absorb it through various means; reading, hearing, watching, saying it out loud in your own words.  The more you can add emotion to information the more it registers as a memory.   Layer in an experience with the information, and it changes how you assimilate it.   It is the difference between seeing data versus gaining knowledge.  It is understanding. 

We become accustomed to getting answers in a certain way, and they become empty calories.  We are satisfied for that moment, and then that passes and there is barely a residue of the exchange.  What I am wondering is how much we lose when we stop going to the big dictionary in the musty library to flip through the pages of other words we could know to learn what we sought.

If you want facts, they are there for you, just ask Siri.  If you want more, if you want to be changed by the experience, you will need to invest yourself.  Go, touch, talk, smell, remember, and then tell someone about it.

Edinburgh is really two cities, the old and the new.  If you get up early, before the traffic clogs the streets, and run to a ridge that overlooks the harbor you can see the sun rise on both worlds; the modern metropolis and the thousand year old bastion of early civilization. 

If you were walking to the castle, and wanted to stop for coffee, there is a shop on a narrow street along the way.  It is on a steep hill so the sidewalk is canted, but the shop owner is optimistic about his patrons and puts a table and two chairs outside for the intrepid.  The coffee is rich and nutty, strong and hot.  The chocolate croissant is fresh, still warm from the case where it sat in the stray beam of sunlight. 

Perched in the tilted chair, the cups and plates next to you bravely defying gravity on the café table, you can sense the city around you.  The hint of ocean in the air, the cool cobblestone road, the clamor of traffic at the bottom of the hill, the lyrical brogue of the people passing.  It is an important crossroads in Scotland, rich with history and potential. 

They can’t fit it all on Wikipedia.

Hope this finds you understanding,

David

Copyright © 2016 David Smith