the accessibility of information in our society

The accessibility of information in our society

With the development of communications, science and technology during the second half of the 20^th century, the American sociologist Zbignev Bzhezinski expressed his theory of technological society. In fact, this prediction was quite an accurate one and we can well see that our society today is analogical to the one Bzhezinski talked about. However, there is one thing that he could not predict. Hardly anybody could predict the actual effect that today’s world of high technologies would have on the individual.

A month ago, I talked with a man who was interested in the animals used in the Scandinavian mythology and had decided to use the Internet as a source of information. He complained to me about the information available in the Net. I was astonished because I couldn’t believe that he had not found anything on the topic. However, the problem was not in the lack of information but in its overabundance. As soon as he had clicked with the mouse, hundreds of pages appeared in front of his eyes. The result was that finally he had preferred to choose a more practical alternative – to go to the library and find the information that he needed there. Extrapolating from this, otherwise everyday occurrence, I tend to think that the more available information becomes in our modern world, the less informed the ordinary people are.

That is the paradox of today’s society, which apart from ‘modern’ can hardly be called ‘informed’. Being overburdened with plethora of information, the man of the 21^st century is under the illusion that learning is senseless since nowadays you can find almost everything in a glimpse of an eye. However, one should not forget that the Internet and all the other modern sources of information are just the means helping us to enrich our knowledge but not the knowledge itself.