The illusion of knowledge

Clay Shirky's cognitive surplus or Nicholas Carr's brain re-wiring?
The Internet as a positive impact on human development or a negative one?

The debate rages on and there are those firmly encamped in each corner and those that believe both are true and intertwined (i.e. me)

I just came across an article in the LA Times which is well worth a read entitled:
Digital alarmists are wrong: Google is not making us stupid, PowerPoint is not destroying literature, and the Internet is not really changing our brains.

In it, the author claims that there is no specific evidence to support the theories of Nicholas Carr and that brain wiring is dependent on genetic predispositions which a child is already in possession of long before they discover Facebook and the Internet. The article tends to support Clay Shirky's 'cognitive surplus' direction that the Internet gives us access to each other and therefore the collective brain which is far more intelligent than any individual human being could be which is of course very true...

However, one thought that seemed to vaguely resemble Carr's argument around the negative impact of all of our hours spent online, was the notion of the 'illusion of knowledge':

'Although the case that technology increases our intelligence is at least as plausible as the gloomy idea that it is changing our brains for the worse, there are real downsides to the instant availability of torrents of information. The danger comes not from the information itself, or from how it could rewire our brains, but from the way we think about our own knowledge and abilities. As the psychologists Leon Rozenblit and Frank Keil discovered, people tend to suffer from an illusion of knowledge: a tendency to mistake surface-level familiarity with deep understanding. As more information becomes readily available, that sense of familiarity grows and grows, and with it the illusion of knowledge. On-demand access to reams of data can also trick us into mistaking knowledge we could obtain quickly for knowledge we already have and can act upon. And if the illusion leads us to neglect the acquisition of true knowledge, we as individuals could become dumber as a result.'

The idea that the internet is making us think we are smarter is entirely possible when the answers to billions of questions are at our finger tips and can be displayed on our screen within seconds. Why therefore would anyone need to do a degree to learn the methods of rocket scientists when they can find it online (of course you wouldn't call yourself a rocket scientist unless you had an actual degree but you could think you knew enough about it)? It's a significant danger that the next generation will be facing when it comes to their education and vocational training...

Read the rest of the article here