Raise the Hammer

Great article, Ryan--I'll spend my afternoon at work reading the Slate and Atlantic pieces (which will be nice introductions to the weekend).

While I think I agree with your list of epistemological beliefs, especially if aggregated on a societal level (I'm not convinced that at the individual level, knowledge is cumulative--I think there are limits to meaningful knowledge and recall in people), I think that they, along with initial question you asked:

"Why hold, say, the most quotable works of Keats committed to memory when you can look them up in mere seconds, and save your brain for higher-order thinking?"

further illustrate the problem that posed by the Atlantic author--that the dominant socio-cultural orientation is one biased towards processing vast QUANTITIES of information rather than fully mining or appreciating its quality. This orientation couldn't be clearer to me, as I work as a social researcher and most of my work involves trawling the net and putting together quick and dirty reports from those individual strands of information. One thing I'm rarely asked to do is any serious interpretation or high-order analysis of that data--I am to my superiors as Google is to me--we're all retaining our higher-order cognition for that eventual analysis or interpretation, not wishing to bog our minds down with the minutae of actually reading and understanding the source material.

This works quite fine for producing reports and briefs (and works fine for me because I don't need to memorize any boring and dry data), but the problem I see is that it doesn't develop any expertise over source material, only expertise at searching for it, and the tools we use to search (Google, etc.) no longer act as tools, but are actually like cybernetic additions to our brains: I would not be able to do my job WITHOUT the internet, so I don't try to fool myself into believing I'm master of the material, only an efficient drone asked to search it out.

So referring directly back to the original metaphors (pancakes or butter on toast), I disagree with your suggestion that knowledge is necessarily DENSER. Knowledge density suggests not only its volume or quantity, but its mass, which I would liken more to an appreciation or understanding of its quality. You suggest that the mere knowledge of the pathways to certain facts or source material is equivalent to its understanding, and I would argue that that's insufficient. Just as rote learning disregards the latent content of a subject, knowing where to locate something is similarly 'thin' learning.

In which case, we ARE "losing something important" by training our brains to act as indices (or creating personal habits, as you suggest) instead of the libraries themselves. I make not like Keats and want to keep some space in my head for something else, but think of something you can relate to: Isn't it funny how I still manage to keep random 30 Rock quotes up there for months at a time? With a single line, I can still imagine entire Kids in the Hall skits 10 years after I watched them. Same things with lessons from my university sociology textbooks, and I find myself re-reading Machiavelli or Weber years later just because I feel the material slipping, and along with that my inherent understanding of it.

Gah, this doesn't feel finished but it's already too long, sorry.