The Internet Helps You Mimic Knowledge but You Might Still Be Stupid
A.K.A Do the actual work
These days I never have to worry about impressing anyone, I generally just have to make sure of two things;
- I have a fully charged phone on me
- My data is on and working
With those two things in place, all I have to do is basically Google everything even when I am sorta, kinda convinced of the answer.
I kid you not on that ‘everything’ note. Sometimes I’m in church and instead of looking up a passage on my bible like a normal person, I type a few words from the scripture on my phone and read it off Google.
This dependence on the World Wide Web becomes even deeper when we are having a cat-fight online. I. WILL. HUNT. THE. INTERNET. FOR. RECEIPTS! And I will display them oh so marvelously in your comments.
I know I am not alone in this ‘doing too much with the internet’ boat. The internet has provided us with a way to mimic knowledge that we do not really have and present this knowledge with pizzazz.
This is why someone who studied engineering in school will boldly give you advice on nutrition, lecturing you like they did the four-year course of study, 6-month IT and even one year internship that is the conduit to presenting yourself as a dietitian.
We are living in a time where we have sites and apps for practically everything. When I am trying to come up with a personal statement for my resume, there are resume samples online that I can refer to. Alternatively, I can pay a small sum to get a job site to finesse my resume in line with the job I am applying for.
When I need to seem knowledgeable about any material, I can type it up on Google and skim through the first three articles that rank on the search engine.
This reliance on the internet to mimic knowledge can actually make us dumber. You need to ask yourself the amount of things that we are achieving currently with just an application or a function on our smart phones that would have required a specialized skill set to do before.
There will be quite a lot if you sit down and think long and hard about it but you do not even need to, you could just Google it with your handy Smartphone and you will certainly find listicles on the subject.
On my Smartphone, an old Samsung Galaxy S5, I can navigate in cities, buy goods online, subscribe for services, calculate answers to complex mathematical problems, and change the channel on my T.V along with a hundred other tasks.
Some of these things I had to do with specific learned skills in what seems like a pretty distant past (thanks internet!). I had routes and road networks memorized because there was no hope for GPS, I had to manually edit messages or even articles like this one without relying on autocorrect features or software editing tools.
The internet has enabled us and is enabling us to do even more while failing to understand the intricacies of what we are doing and boy do I love it. The lift of the pressure to cram large amounts of technical knowledge is not bad, it frees up our time to work on even more epic stuff but...
Do you really have the knowledge you think you have?
Any good resume site worth its salt will tell a writer applying for a job in a digital marketing firm to attest to having skills in SEO writing. A quick search of SEO skills will throw up some generic knowledge on what it is all about.
If you are lucky, you will be able to bullshit your way through an interview process and we are not even here to judge; jobs are scarce and man must wack but it is what you do afterwards that will really count.
You need to go beyond mimicking knowledge with the aid of the internet to actually learning. This means putting in the work and looking for the best articles and materials on the subject you are interested in.
Read far and wide, experiment with the things that you learn online in real life situations; let them succeed or fail and then actually become something that you know; knowledge you can defend.
Take online courses on it, go for training on it; go from faking it to knowing the hell out of it!
