When there is demand, there will be supply.
This rule applies for everything under the sun, including information.
Our ancestors realized the importance of information long long time ago.
Chinese even has a legend that when Cang Jie (仓颉） first invented the chinese characters, the whole world was shocked, gods and ghosts cried and the sky just changed color, because they knew humans would be able to access the sacred knowledge from then on. Of course this was a myth, if you are curious, here is the related Wikipedia link (In Chinese). And yes, the picture there really shows this guy has four eyes, I am not sure why, maybe they (the ancient Chinese) believed he was so special that he shouldn't look normal.
No matter in the East or West, literacy was used to be confined to the selected elite few and written articles were considered sacrosanct. But as education becomes more and more ubiquitous, the literacy rate goes up significantly every generation.
Now we are facing information overflow. The Internet is a giant hose connected to an unfathomable deep reservoir of information. No matter what kind of information, you can get them in tonnes. How to address the influx of seemingly overwhelming volume of data is a challenge for everybody.
In fact, information has the same characteristics as the normal tangible items like table, car, chair in the sense they are hard to get rid of from one's house. This observation is easily verified during a house-cleaning, how many times you paused at an item that you seldom or never used and thought "Maybe this will be useful later"?
Sounds familiar? Paul Graham has a good article on stuff here.
1 comment:
Some possibilities on why he has 4 eyes:-
1. He was the first man to ever wear glasses.
2. The artist really needed a pair of glasses at the time of painting.
3. He's actually an alien sent to teach Chinese writing.
4. Radiation from some nuclear powered spaceships mutated his DNA when he was developing in the womb giving him super intelligence but also 4 independent eyes that could move around like a chameleon's.
I think, the most important thing is filtering out what's real and what's not. The next step would then be up to an individual to decide what he wants to absorb.
Unfortunately, much of what's real and what's not cannot be easily distinguished as much of the knowledge passed from writings and orally have been manipulated throughout the ages. I personally don't trust much of history as every country seems to have their own version of it. Science and maths cannot be manipulated too much as they can easily be repeated at any place and time and therefore, much more trustworthy compared to arbitrary things like history and religion.
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