Hi readers,
I'm back after many months of silence!
I hope I still have readers after so long
a break.
Much has changed in my life since you
last heard from me, bar the fact
that i'm still alive and kicking.
This won't be a seriously well constructed
Blog by any means,
partly because i just want to get back into the
swing of writing,
and secondly, it's late.
Very late.
I haven't been around for very long,
but, in my few years of existence I have noticed an extraordinary
change in the way people access
information.
I have a hard time putting a name to the age we are living in, You would rightly say that this is the information age, but not quite
exactly define it in its complexity.
I was reading John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, and in the preface, he mentions that he lives in the age of knowledge.
That's the 18th century!
So what exactly is the 21st century?
To be honest, I think our age is accelerating so rapidly that even a decade is too long a timeframe to warrant a specific name.
It seems ridiculous, but, just 5 years ago, the internet was not half as usefull as it is now.
So, where are we?
The information age?
The digital age?
The knowledge age?
I'll be a bit vulgar and just call it the 'Now Age', for now.
The truth is that information is so accesible to us that it's scary!
For example, it's possible for me to do my Degree through Unisa, almost entirely from my phone!
I already have all my study guides and modules stored in a folder on my memory card, and I have already submited some assignments directly from my phone!
We have an unimaginable amount of information throwing itself at us every second of every day,
In what used to be a communication device between two people, we have become consumers of information.
It's possible to write many books about how this affects our ability to think, if we even think at all anymore.
Yet in this time of instant information, where knowledge is literally at our fingertips, it doesn't seem to migrate any further than the very tips of our hands. It doesn't enter our brain. Who needs to think anymore anyways? You can google anything now, and if that doesn't work, your enquiry is probably irrelevant anyway.
If google or the internet can't solve
your problem or furbish you with the information you require, you tend to give up.
Often people will qualify their intelectual defeat with the words,
'I couldn't find anything on google.'
Then we move on with life.
Do you identify with that?
If you have somehow stumbled upon my blog,
I have no doubt you
know exactly what i'm talking about.
Please forgive my genderlect in the next statement;
Education forms the man,
But, reading, the gentleman.
I like that. Which is why i choose to read old books, free from the modern intelectual chaos.
It would be kind to say that we are being force fed information on a daily basis, but, the contrary is true.
We are being spoon fed, by the media, internet, google, youtube etc.
It's not education, but dictation, even though we choose what to expose ourselves to, it hardly constructs any individuality in our thinking.
So, what does this all mean?
Is knowledge really that usefull anymore?
Does it hold any value to us?
How do we survive in this instant information frenzy?
I think we need to realize the limits of knowledge itself, and recognize that there are aspects of life that will remain unknowable, especially if the pursuit of knowledge and information is all we make life out to be.
In the words of John Locke, knowledge is to the mind as the anchor to the sailor, it's usefull only if you know the depth of the ocean, but useless in determining the depths of all the seas.
And with that, i will end this random rambling of a blog with my
contemporary version of what Locke was trying to get across,
with a metaphysical twist,
That our mind needs divine guidance in order to make sense of this world.
Knowledge is but the anchor of the human mind in
an ocean of uncertainty. Yet with it we make bold
attempts to determine the depths of truth, the
boundaries of reason, the vastness of love, the
substance of ethics, but when man is faced with the
question of questions; The meaning of meaning itself, he finds himself
shipwrecked, the true skeptic, on an island of
skepticism. For such questions can only be navigated
with a transcendent sense of direction, and
answered,
when the mind ascends to faith.
