Just this semester it has become clear to me that even very bright students increasingly do not know how to use books and don’t give a damn that they don’t know how. They view the Internet as the Reality rather than as a message board on which materials that exist in reality are posted virtually. They have no concept that a book exists out there, was written, edited, translated, published by someone. They find it on the Internet and cite to the Internet as the reality of this piece of data.
They have no concept of the blood, sweat, tears that went into transcribing, editing, translating that work. To them it’s just one of billions of items in ether. They confuse a convenient medium for disseminating data with the data themselves.
Increasingly they have no concept of time-consuming, careful writing and crafting of communication. They view information as instantaneous.
But it’s not, at least not all of it. The more ephemeral produced-for-Internet stuff, yes. But they have little idea that much of what pops up in a Google search has a life of its own, sometimes a life of thousands of years, and that being carried on the Internet is just a mask, just the latest in millennia of media for transmitting information.
Am I wrong to think that the inability to distinguish the virtual from the real is a real loss to intelligent living?
Is it possible that they have never been taught how to use books? You can not know what you have not been taught
I enjoyed reading your post 4.
At one time it was high school graduates who never learned the pleasure of reading books. Today many of the college graduates have joined that group. Sad.