Musing Monday: A Quote Stuck in My Head

As I was scrolling through my Facebook updates one day recently, I came across a picture.  Now, most of the time, I do just scroll through it; I glance at who has updated to decide if I want to read it (there are a few people that I read their posts regardless), and scroll on.  I generally stop for pictures.  No, not always because I'm interested in someone's vacation photos, but because I've "liked" so many pages that update with things that amuse me that I've become trained to stop and look at the funny pictures.

Most of the time, when I come across a picture with a quote on it, it's religious, related to a new couple, etc.  Rarely do I find insightful quotes on pictures.  Then I ran across this one:

"In the age of information, ignorance is a choice."  I don't know why this struck me so, but it did.  It's something I haven't quite been able to get out of my head -- almost like a song.  Now, I'm not going to track down when and where this was first written or said by Donny Miller because it's somewhat doubtful that the words mean the exact same to both people.

You know Google's amazing autocomplete feature?  Well, it automatically filled in the quote with "meaning" after it.  I skimmed through a few of them and strangely enough, they had nothing to do with how I felt the interpretation of the words.  It's high school English class all over again!  Two of the opposite-ends-of-the-spectrum responses I found were one where it was related completely to technology (mostly privacy issues), and the other was about a family matter and being isolated from a particular part of the family.  Of course, it could be related to anything news or politics themed also.

I, however, took it to be general knowledge. How many times a day do you think of something, whip out your smartphone, and look something up online?  I do it all the time.  How often are you watching a movie and think, "Oh, that guy in Kingdom of Heaven is Jaime Lannister, isn't it?!" (or something along those lines) and do a quick IMDB search?  How often do you want to learn how to do something and do a quick YouTube search? These examples are a little more specific, but you get the point.

From Wikipedia

One of the schools I did my student teaching at issued each student a laptop.  One morning before school, one of my students came up and asked me, "How old is the Queen of England?"  You also have to understand that this came out of left field because we weren't studying anything remotely English.  I looked at her and said, "You know, I don't know.  But I do know someone who does.  Let's go ask Google!"  She opened her laptop, went to Google and typed "How old is the Queen of England?"  It brought up the Wikipedia page and she almost automatically called to me and said, "She's 87 years old!" before going right back to reading the article.  She stayed on there until the bell rang for class to begin.

When I was working on my plarn bag at Zach's one time, his youngest brother who is seven years-old came up somewhat fascinated.  He was not necessarily interested in the process of crocheting like Katie was, but interested in the fact that I could do it.  "How did you learn to do that?" was his question.  "Well, it was something I wanted to learn how to do, so I learned how to do it.  I went online and looked up videos on how and practiced until I could do it.  Almost anyone can learn how to do almost anything online now."  (Naturally, he went in the seven-year-old-boy direction of my meaning and turned it into, "So a baby can learn how to skateboard?", but that's neither here nor there.)

I've always been a learner, though.  Before the internet was widely available, I was the weird kid that loved encyclopedias.  I would even go so far as to taking them into the bathroom with me when I was young.  When I mean young, I also mean young.  I was reading in pre-school, so by kindergarten I was using encyclopedias.  That's how I learned the sign language alphabet by kindergarten.

I joke that I'm probably on some kind of government watch list because of some of my searches.  For example, I've recently looked up eunuchs and lepracy.  Eunuchs was because of the emphasis of them in Game of Thrones and lepracy because of Kingdom of Heaven.  If I run across something that seems to be a reoccurring theme, I look it up because I want to make sure I'm getting the author/director's full meaning.   

And that's just in books and movies.  Imagine what other strange things I've Googled!

"In the age of information, ignorance is a choice."  I'm not saying we can know everything about everything, but make sure you indulge those nagging curiosities every once and a while.  Learn something new!  Google doesn't judge your searches.  Don't just choose to be ignorant.