The phrase above — "Knowledge is power" — is often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, who, besides being our third president, knew just about everything about everything: history, astronomy, agriculture, music, you name it. He wrote the Declaration of Independence; he designed the campus of the University of Virginia; he became America’s first wine geek, importing French wines to Monticello as early as the 1790s. His library there contained more than 6,000 volumes, later forming the building blocks of today's Library of Congress.
Jefferson wasn’t the first to use the phrase above, but he certainly described how the world used to work, built as it was around what he called, in an 1817 letter, “the important truths; that knowledge is power, knowledge is safety, and knowledge is happiness.”
What Jefferson believed remained largely true for most of the next two centuries. Over those centuries, except during periods of warfare (unfortunately, all too frequent), knowledge was what separated the wheat from the chaff, in virtually every field. The more information you carried around in your head, the more likely you were to be successful in whatever field of endeavor you pursued.
Today, things seem somewhat different. Yes, one still needs to know what’s what in order to be, say, a successful cardiologist or auto mechanic. But much of the basic information that those of us over 40 were required to commit to memory in order to be high-functioning adults now seems less essential and often irrelevant.
Nowadays we all have something Thomas Jefferson could never have imagined: the reality of random-access memory. In fact, the acronym “RAM” became an early descriptor of what computer chips provided; by 1990 the floppy disc had become the physical embodiment of random-access memory. Today, a single chip holds more memory than a thousand floppy discs once did, and each of us walks around with more RAM in our phones than existed in Jefferson’s entire world.
I count myself lucky that my lifetime has corresponded with what is clearly the single most transformational era in human history. Granted, it’s not all been “progress.” The fact that a handful of companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, etc. — now control the engine rooms of this technological revolution has had enormous impact upon the way local businesses and communities function, not just here in Memphis, but all over the globe. We now live in a world where people can find anything and everything online, and even search out their own particular realities, dismissing the ones they don't like as “fake news.”
But what concerns me most is how our brains themselves are being relentlessly re-wired, to an extent that we’re not able yet to begin understanding. For example, as a kid in Boston, I first learned how powerful knowledge was, among my peers at least, when I realized I had the ability to recall from memory the starting lineups of every Red Sox team between 1958 and 1970. Okay, that wasn’t exactly rocket science, but surely, the exercise of memorization does something to enhance the muscle strength of the brain.
I now wonder if that particular muscle is getting flabby, as learning itself becomes more and more of a random-access thing. For example, it took me all of four minutes on Google to confirm all the information in the first two paragraphs of this essay. In 1990, I would have had to root around what books I had at home or go off to the library to seek out the information I needed to write those paragraphs.
For those of us in the news business, technology has made our jobs easier, but I’m not altogether sure if this is entirely a good thing. For example, my son-in-law has been a college professor for almost 20 years now, and he notes a big difference in what happens before class starts between now and when he started teaching. “In the past, students used to come in 10 minutes early, and chat among themselves,” he observes. “Today, they come in and are glued to their phones until I start talking and class begins.”
Something does seem to get lost when you have knowledge at your fingertips — so much knowledge that you hardly know where to start or finish. Time will tell just how children of the twenty-first century come to grips with this entirely new concept of intelligence, so foreign to those of us who thought ourselves so clever when we memorized baseball rosters.
