Exposition-+Goh+Id

“New technologies have created a situation rather unknown in human history wherein the young seem more knowledgeable than those older than them.”    To what extent do you agree with this statement? The twentieth century marked a cerebral change in the hierarchical construction of society, whereby following the intense advancements in technology and the sharing of knowledge, the young have now come to pose a clear challenge to the perennial belief of age being the equivocation of the amount of knowledge a person would gather through experience and learning through age, a polar pivot of inherent societal beliefs in the near-past. Knowledge, quintessentially, would be defined as the a  cquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, as from study or investigation; general erudition. I disagree with the statement to a large extent. The topic’s lack of genuine clarity allows for a plethora of perspectives towards the issue, and the statement brings in the sceptical belief that the young are truly more knowledgeable than those older than them, and I shall attempt, in steadfast efforts, to disprove of—this belief. Firstly, I partially agree with the statement as its possible connotations brings in the suggestion that with the advent of technology and widespread access to this pool, ocean of knowledge, isolates the older people from the younger ones, and at the same time providing the younger generation with an near-infinite source of information pertaining close to every possible topic thinkable. While the exponential increase in the amount of information readily available to people through means of such technology is a surprising one, more intriguingly is the fact that this information is heavily dependent on the skill and ability of the user to process and extricate information otherwise enmeshed in a web of redundant and excessive spam. This, evidently, is something that most older people are unable to do, hence making them seem to lag-far-behind, living in their own isolated small-worlds as juxtaposed to a generation where mastery of such technology is prevalent and extensive. The creation, fast development and availability of the World Wide Web in less than a century into a household-permeating function exemplifies this increase; where thirty years ago people like Bill Gates were sitting behind scarce huge supercomputers in college has become one where any high-school student would have easy access to a computer, broadband and internet—the epitome of technological advancements, and more importantly, are able to utilise these functions to their near maximal potential. Hence, the topic raises the empirical fact there is a generation gap between the old and the young, a language barrier of sorts that demarcates the differences in ability to make use of such a technology between the two factions, making the young //seem// to be more knowledgeable then the old due to this superior ability of theirs. However, I disagree largely with the statement because it suggests that this differing gap in knowledge between the old and the young—the young being more knowledgeable—was never prevalent before the world was poised at the cusp of such a momentous development in technology with the phrase ‘ a situation rather unknown in human history’. This I believe to be untrue, and to be a direct effect of the self-superior belief that the older people superimpose on the younger people. There was and is an existence of a widespread consensus that knowledge is a natural hallmark of age, a belief which tentacles have stretched far into many cultures and societies since ancient, predominantly Asian ones, a belief that has been unjustifiably raised by the topic. Deeply sated Confucius ideals widely embellish the households of Asian or Chinese families, carrying with them beliefs that are essentially identical to ancient ideals of respect towards elders due to their age and their corresponding depth of knowledge. It has probably been a millennium since Confucius roamed China, and in the many years following his death, China and many other Asian countries have adopted his egalitarian ideals, ranging from the unquestioning respect dedicated towards older people, and the belief that they are more knowledgeable because they are older, and knowledge being the equivalent of age and experience. So widespread and deep the roots of such beliefs that this notion had been transferred into their subconscious, formulating a definite section of life that nobody questioned. However, this does not mean that the old were truly more knowledgeable than the young to begin with, and indeed there was a large trend of knowledgeable, young people even in china before the advent of these new technologies. The china-revolutionary Deng Xiao Ping was barely twenty before he went to France to study, and came back with the knowledge of western education and capitalistic societies before massively changing China through reforms. Indeed, the purpose of his education in France encapsulates the idea of knowledge not being limited to the told; before going to France, his teachers told him "To learn __knowledge__ and truth from the West in order to save China." Deng Xiaoping was privy to both the education of the East and the West, and became the resulting culmination of two sides. Knowledgeable compared to those older than him?

Finally, I disagree because the young do not ‘seem more knowledgeable than those older than them’, rather, they are more knowledgeable than those older than them. The constant upgrading of new technologies creates the ready availability of resources and information, and the easy transmission and sharing of such information through peer-to-peer networks. What matters here is that the benefits technology has brought has expanded into titanic proportions, and it is specifically catered to the younger people, who have mastered them and are able to utilise this threshold of knowledge to unlimited extent. Knowledge, being defined as the mastery of facts, truths, or principles, can be placed into the context that anyone can be knowledgeable, the essential being that there has to be a thirst for knowledge that propels the seeking of knowledge—anyone who wants to attain knowledge can attain it, but they must have the continuous seeking of this self-enhancement. The development of the World Wide Web so extensively has allowed previously mummified sources of information to be accessible on websites—entire dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopaedias and research papers readily available to those that have both a thirst for knowledge and the skills necessary to grasp them, providing them with a stepping-stone to once unscalable territories, at the same time giving scant disregard towards those unable to use this technology. The issue at hand now would be whether the ‘natural gaining’ of knowledge through age and experience is on the same competitive level, and with such a plethora of resources available to young people, it is highly implausible that the knowledge through experiences and dead-pan technology can approach the level of the internet.