Hiding behind the Internet

We used to have libraries. And whenever we had to do a project at school, in college or even at work, we used to go to the library and ‘refer’ to the books, journals, papers etc there.

There was effort needed to access the knowledge in the library and perhaps a little more persistence to be able to find what was needed. Persistence is what signified a good search! And persistence was linked with interest. The greater the interest the greater was the desire to find out!

And then, one fine day we were handed over the ‘keys’ to the world wide in the shape of the search engine. The search engine was a place that you went to search (instead of the usual visit to the library) and you could access anything and everything – including many libraries!

There was no more walking around the aisles in the libraries– no more reaching to the top shelf on that ladder – the persistence was not needed any more, at least not as much. With the need for persistence gone – almost everybody could find something on almost everything. Knowledge access was a no-brainer reduced to the search string in your favourite search engine.

This is good – in fact it is a revolutionary achievement. But other than the fact that Internet is actually inspiring a lot many under-privileged farmers to be able to get the right price for their crops, other than the fact that it is making people, separated over thousands of miles, meet in virtual chats, Internet is spawning a new community –a group of people who I call ‘Something about Everything but Nothing in Particular.’ These are the people who do not have the answer to the questions you are asking but thanks to their internet surfing skills, they can deftly ‘cook’ something up that ‘looks like’ an answer but is definitely not it. They know how to hide their lack of understanding behind the volume of information that they generate through Internet.

I see more and more of them. They are the people who do not want to know, do not care to know but can always talk. If you take away their Internet connection – they are likely to be paralyzed - work wise!

To me this is the biggest side-effect of the rise of Internet. People who are mediocre in their understanding of things and also lack the passion to understand things are riding on four horses of search engines, cutting, copying and pasting and have create what I call a circus of pseudo-knowledge. All this, not just in a casual context like this Blog (which also might offer a lot of bullshit!), but even in formal business situations!

While there is this growing, ‘Something about Everything but Nothing in Particular’, tribe – there also is a set of people who are actually utilizing internet very smartly. For them internet is a way to connect with and reach out to the kind of people they want to work with, interact with. For them Internet is a way to energize their career through knowledge share and networking. I describe them pretty much the same way that Peter F Drucker did just that I’d like to add the ‘networked’ property to them. To me they are the ‘Network Knowledge Workers’.

Like any tool – Internet is also just as good as the hands it finds itself in. However the tool is being misused much more than otherwise. In many ways, the Internet is not bridging the knowledge divide; instead it is creating this haze that is making nonsense look like something worth going through. To me the day in not far when the online space would require higher order search engine that can separate works of ‘Something about Everything but Nothing in Particular’ from that of ‘Network Knowledge Workers’.

Comments

[deepak purchanda]

Hi Saurabh, it's an interesting blogpost.

But how do you personify and identify both these set of people ?

[Saurabh Sharma]

Thanks for reading Deepak. Frankly I have not classified them thus - I define them on the basis of the way they utilize the Internet. Some of the questions that I ask before classifying a group or a person as one or the other are:
1. Does s/he process information from the Internet to present information from the internet?
2. Is Internet a starting point for knowledge search or an end in itself?
3. Is the person enriching the Internet or just populating it with more MBs/GBs?
There could be more working in my subconscious but I need time to spell them out clearly..

I believe that it is possible that one Network Knowledge Worker (who is enriching Internet with business ideas) might be a Something about Everything but Nothing in Particular in many other streams (viz. art, entertainment, shopping, fashion etc)
Hope this answers your question in some way..