Exposition-+Joel

Have new technologies created a situation in which the young are more knowledgeable than the old? By Joel Tan Jiong Yang 4H-1 (10) L1 Knowledge, the acquaintance with facts and principles, is one of the most precious gems embedded in humanity’s crown. For millennia, knowledge has been gathered through the process of learning. The further a person has travelled down the path of learning, the more knowledgeable is a person, while the longer one has lived, the more one travels down that path. It is from these simple facts that the simple truth, of the old being more knowledgeable than the young, arises. However, with the advent of new technologies such as computers and the internet, one does not have to live long to travel a large distance down the path of learning, and to acquire knowledge. It is this startling new fact that gives rise to the unfamiliar phenomenon of the young being more knowledgeable than the old. In this new world, we must first realise that the young are able to harness the power of technology to gain knowledge. The young are able to exploit the new opportunities afforded by new technologies, to gain more knowledge than they could have given their age, in an earlier age. Now, they are able to access information that would have once been available only in university libraries, or in the research papers of tenured professors, or perhaps in limited amounts of books in a small number of bookstores. For example, the gene-centred view of evolution, as propounded by Richard C. Dawkins, John Maynard-Smith et al, would have once been available only within the doors Oxford and a few other prestigious universities. Even with Dawkins’ best-selling book, The Selfish Gene, on this topic, and his lectures at various universities and public libraries, these ideas would have, at best, reached the minds of over a million people or so. But now, the internet has allowed people access to such knowledge, at the click of a button. A quick search on Google.com shows that around five hundred thousand web pages mention The Selfish Gene; thousands of web pages are devoted to propounding and criticising this gene-centred view of evolution. A quick look at Wikipedia alone gives me a good idea of the gene-centred view of evolution. And of course, such easy access to knowledge would not be possible without the advent of new technologies such as the computer and the internet. This, coupled with the fact that young people are proficient at the usage of computers and the internet, knowledge, for the young, is literally one click away. Schools now offer computer courses; while not every student might be able to write computer programmes, almost every student who can touch a computer can certainly use it, and use it well. In The Millennial Adolescence, Nan Bahr and Donna Pendergast report that ‘children are more technologically competent than their parents, and technology has taken such an all-consuming hold on the household that young people are elevated in their relationships with parents and other adults’. In other words, children are technologically literate. They are able to harness technology; they are able to access videos of Dawkins lecturing on the gene-centred view of evolution, among other things, so as to gain knowledge at a mind boggling rate. All this while, the unfortunate old are unable to harness the power of technology to gain knowledge. As established in the paragraph prior to this one, new technologies open the door to a world of knowledge. However, the old are unable to open that door, to that world of knowledge. This disability is a result of technological illiteracy. Many parents may be familiar with the feeling of incomprehension in regards to the actions of their child on the computer and on the internet. As Bahr and Pendergast suggest, ‘parents lack the technical skills to oversee [their children's use of the internet].’ This technical impotence extends to most of the time-honoured, as such technologies were of course unavailable in their youth, and learning to handle such technologies is infinitely harder when one is in already well into their forties. As Judy M. Zarit states, in Mental Disorders in Older Adults: Fundamentals of Assessment and Treatment, ‘older people generally learn more slowly and thus benefit more from repetitions’. It is from this learning handicap that technological illiteracy arises. In any case, as Ted Flemming suggests, in Lifelong Learning: The Challenge of the Later Years, ‘when you or I arrive at old age, we have already a tightly packed set of meanings which we have accumulated from our individual history and our society/culture.’ Or rather, the old’s preconceived beliefs have taken root so strongly that change, in the form of the introduction of new technologies, is opposed. All this contributes to the singular idea of the old being technologically illiterate, and being unable to harness technology to gain knowledge. Of course, some would point out that knowledge is gotten not only from the usage of new technologies such as the internet, and that the old are still vastly more knowledgeable than the young, due to their long life and copious amounts of experiences. However, we must not fail to note that mere living cannot bring about significant amounts of knowledge. Perhaps living will bring with it some simple, practical knowledge, that will allow a person to go about his business more efficiently, but mere living cannot bring about knowledge of the natural world or of the human condition. For example, a person who simply goes about earning a living for all his life, will never learn about, say, ethical philosophy; also, he would not know what the philosophers like Rene Descartes and Bertrand Russell opine. It is self-evident that mere living cannot bring about significant knowledge, because knowledge has grown with the times; simple truths of life and of the world, that are discovered through the process of living, pale in significance when juxtaposed with the entirety of human knowledge. Ergo, knowledge as achieved through experiencing life is in fact not as significant as it is made out to be. Therefore, it could be said that with the confluence of a number of factors, namely the fact that the young is able to harness the power of technology to gain knowledge, the truth that the old is unable to harness the power of technology to obtain knowledge, and the relative insignificance of knowledge as obtained through the process of living, have resulted in the young being more knowledgeable than the old. When excluding academics from consideration, it may be said, truthfully, that the new opportunities that new technologies offer, to learn and to obtain knowledge, have allowed the young to become more knowledgeable than their age would have once allowed, such that they are, perhaps, more knowledgeable than the old.