Index Linked
About eighteen months ago I experienced a revelation that left me reeling. Being very well acquainted with technology I am always trying new things and whilst “playing” with some new technology my mind began to wander. Childhood memories of being forced to learn essential information by rote came flooding back to me.
Devastated, I realised an old chum (one for whom I had sweated and strained my brain muscles so much) was about to die. Even more worrying was the fact he was dying slowly and unnoticed by the rest of the world. Friends were not rallying around to care for, or even save, my childhood friend.
Go look something up – just some random fact such as “Why do seahorses have noses?”. How would you go about it?
- Image via Wikipedia
Imagine your index finger running down the index page of an encyclopaedia, eyes darting looking for “Seahorse”. Jumping to the page indicated you’ll now pore over all the information and still be none the wiser.
Knowledge in traditional reference books is inherently flawed, insomuch as it is perilously fragmented. Looking for the complete story in one place is often a fruitless task as no one writer or academic knows everything. More of a challenge is how information and understanding changes so rapidly, making any single source of facts impossible to find.
Nowadays we don’t look information up in books as often as we did just 5 years ago. Our lives have been, supposedly, enhanced with a new tool claiming to be a true “font of all knowledge”.
Perhaps you’re beginning to get the picture. Quite obviously I’m talking about computers and “the internet” being our new reference library.
Rather than scanning through an index, you’ll just type in a question and get a million potential answers. So more and more we move away from having to use indexes to find stuff, as on every device from our computer to our mobile phone, even our on-line TV guide, we just search.
Teaching children the alphabet A to Z was once considered a fundamental part of learning literacy. Understanding the order in which our letters were sorted helped us organise and find information.
Very few situations remain where we actually need to use the alphabet, so teaching it to children seems somehow irrelevant as it has no place in their daily lives. We do need to understand letters and how they work, but their relative order is of increasingly less importance.
Xactly when the alphabet will die I do not know. Yet die it will as it can now be replaced by simple reference sheet to be used when researching old books.
Zealously, I will fight to make the plight of my old childhood friend known – Save The Alphabet!
Don’t think I didn’t notice your clever little trick, starting each sentence with the next letter of the alphabet! Apart from poor old letter Y, though.
Of course, whole seconds of fun will be lost by the generation that doesn’t learn the correct order of the letters, but that’s progress for you. 
My father belongs to the school of looking things up in books, and remains astounded when he asks me to look things up for him, and I am able to produce the answer while he is still on the phone. But that is the beauty of tinterweb.
The other thing I love about the internet is the way in which you can garner a whole cross section of views on any topic, rather than just reading about it through your chosen newspaper’s prejudices – I like to read the Telegraph, the Guardian and the Daily Mail’s point of view before even deciding on what are likely to be the main facts. Not infallible, but better than a one-sided view.
Thank you Morag… I do love Worpdress – but sometimes it can be a mare when editing posts as it can be quite tricky to track versions. The Y line was accidentally edited out in trying to make the article zippier. Added back by me 10 mins later and then lost through WordPress magic!
Now it is back for good!
Onto many opinions – I often wonder if we can have too many! Does having so many angles make it easier for us to avoid forming our own opinions. I think for most of us a plethora of viewpoints is good brain food. For many – is it just another excuse to avoid self responsibility?
On behalf of the now-represented Y, I thank you.
As for opinions, I would certainly agree that if you try to hold too many, it gets confusing. But what interests me is when you read a right wing paper, it mentions a number of issues related to the topic. But when you get to a left wing paper, it shows up other aspects that had not previously been drawn out (perhaps because it did not support the editorial stance of the paper).
My in laws, for instance, hold very simplistic Daily Mail views on how to solve immigration, education, the economy etc etc. I so want to buy a T shirt which says “It’s a little more complicated than that.”
But what would you do if you discovered your T-Shirt was made in an Indonesian sweat shop?
Simplistically you could agree that would be wrong.
However because you are bringing work and making a stromng political point by wearing it – it is a little more complicated than that…
Oh the many hours we could have passing this one back and forth