On Knowing Things

"Where is the life we have lost in the living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
--TSE, Choruses from "The Rock"

"Most of us know little or nothing of how to produce food. More and more of us cannot build, cannot fix, cannot track, cannot tell time by looking at the sky, cannot hunt, cannot skin or butcher, cannot cook, cannot can, cannot make wine, cannot play instruments (and if we can, often do not know the songs of our culture by which to entertain a variety of generations), cannot dance (i.e. actual dances), cannot remember long passages of poetry, don't know the Bible, cannot spin or knit, cannot sew or darn, cannot chop wood or forage for mushrooms, cannot make a rock wall, cannot tell the kinds of trees by leaves or the kinds of birds by the shape of wing--on and on, in a growing catalogue of abandoned inheritance."
--Patrick Deneen, "Culture, Technology, and Virtue"

I was talking to a dear old lady the other day who lives in an assisted living facility. She recently got her own computer and loves looking things up on the internet. This vaguely reminds me of myself (except I am still laptop-less, although ideally that is a situation that will be shortly remedied). Kudos to her for learning how to use the internet when she isn't young any longer.

But this makes me wonder about how the knowledge we get from the internet affects us--suddenly we can satisfy every curiosity--we can know every fact that it enters into our mind to want to know, and even some that never occurred to us to be curious about. Our knowledge becomes web-like, and sort of stream of consciousness. Our knowledge comes to us from any of a number of sources, from any country, from a person of any age, from anonymous sources, usually. This replaces, at least to an extent, learning from others things that are useful to fulfilling particular jobs and roles. Suddenly learning becomes an isolated rather than a social activity. For instance, several months ago I looked up on the internet a recipe for an old family dish that my grandmother could no longer remember how to make. Don't get me wrong--I am, most certainly addicted to the internet, but I wonder what sort of negative consequences this has on us, in addition to its plenty of positive ones.