Internet Knowledge Society

“Internet knowledge” can be scary. It’s not about how much you know about the internet, but rather the knowledge you gather using the internet.

Internet knowledge tends to give the impression of knowledge about a certain topic, which is one of the reasons why Wikipedia is so successful. For instance, Wikipedia explains Kleene star in less than one page. Yet anyone who has taken a class in complexity theory must have felt those sleepless nights on K* problems–the problems so elegant and simple yet so hard to come up with a solution. In most cases reading from the internet only give you a very basic high level overview of a certain topic. It almost seems like common sense when I say this, but people don’t seem to realize that when they learn about Tuberculosis in under five minutes that their knowledge is basic.

This has given birth to a slew of so-called internet engineers. Their knowledge about software development starts from reading the internet.

Google plays a huge role in this. The Google search engine is simply amazing. If a web developer is stuck he/she issues a search gets back bunch of code, integrates it somehow to his/her problem and there you have things start working. That’s an issue. Developers don’t have the basic understanding, concepts like inheritance, and polymorphism seems like alienated words-yet they are using it everyday in the .NET framework. So I fear this has spawned a culture of believe that we are an educated society.

No knowledge is better than some knowledge. Yes, I didn’t type that incorrectly, I did mean to say no knowledge is better than some knowledge. If you don’t have any knowledge about something it’s very easy to accept it. But if you have some knowledge, then it’s really hard to gaze how much you know. Because relatively, from the point you didn’t know anything – to the point you know something, you actually know infinitely more, even though the knowledge may be 5% of the actual topic.

So what does that mean? Don’t use the internet, don’t use Wikipedia, don’t use Google? No, not at all. Absolutely use these tools, these tools help shape our lives but keep in mind the breath of knowledge you’ve gained. That’s the key.