This is a good place to share things I don’t dare say in class, isn’t it?
Sure.
Part of the process of studying for your master’s degree online is discussions in forums on the school’s site. I’ve already established my reputation as a contrarian there, asking questions where other students just agree on how wonderful the assigned reading was. But I don’t say all I think, because it soon became clear that there’s something like a religious element to the course. We’re being taught the doctrines of the Church of the Enlightenment, Library diocese, and my plan is to mostly keep my head low when we touch on matters of dogma.
Anyway, one of our recent readings was a study whose author questioned whether it’s factually true that we’ve entered into an Information Age, as everybody keeps saying. He analyzes the studies usually appealed to in arguing for this societal change, and finds in them a lot of mushiness and fuzzy categories. Fair enough. He makes some excellent points. But I posed the question, could any real-world evidence actually satisfy his criteria? It seemed to me we could all be assimilated by the Borg, and this guy would still insist there wasn’t enough hard evidence to prove there’d been significant change.
What I didn’t say (though I may say it yet, if pushed), is that some time ago I spoke to a young missionary who’s involved with a project to provide open-source educational materials to Third World people in various cultures. The project faces many challenges, but distribution is not one of them. He said to me, “We’d been in all kinds of cultures – with cattle herders in the veldt, and jungle villages, and we noticed that wherever we went, everybody [that was the word he used, as I recall] has a cell phone, and they access the internet through it.”
My methodology may be sloppy, but that suggests to me that a major change has occurred in the world.