In an article appearing in the Globe and Mail a couple of weeks ago, Peter Nicholson discussed the evolution of the way people process and regurgitate information. The article touches on a topic talked about time and time again when referring to the growth of the internet, social media, and our population. The article notes that as the internet stores increasingly massive amounts of information, it is impossible for individuals to find every piece of information available to them. As a result, we find ourselves only skimming over the information relevant to our lives or our professions, and focusing in depth in these areas. Nicholson states that as a result, our population is moving away from a more general acquisition of knowledge, to a more specialized acquisition. Consequently, he says we are creating “less well-prepared minds, especially on topics outside of individual’s realms”. Or in my opinion, outside of individuals’ RSS feeds.

Nicholson touches upon a topic I have already talked about, the notion that we are living in a world that demands more of us, in less amount time available to us. Therefore, he notes that as we have less time to think, process, and find more information, the ‘market’ for depth is narrowing. We must rely on others, those subject specialists to find the information outside of our specialty, and to share this information with others. There is no way you could follow every RSS feed for every discipline, therefore we must rely on other’s in depth knowledge to provide ourselves with insight. There is an increasing compartmentalization of knowledge, where we know more and more about less and less, and as the amount of information available on the web grows, this compartmentalization is only going to continue. As Nicholson puts it, “get good at one thing and let others deal with all the issues”, but then you must accept you are not going to know everything.

The shift presently occurring is from intellectual authority from producers of depth, those traditionally thought of as the ‘experts’, to intellectual authority from the broader public. And this is where social media fits into the grand scheme of things. Not only does social media allow for those individuals who do have expert knowledge in specific areas easily and quickly share their knowledge with others (so they don’t have to follow every RSS feed available), but social media allows for individuals to become creators of information, and in time become experts.

As information professionals, we focus immensely on issues or topics pertaining to the world of information, libraries, and archives, but may lose sight of other important areas such as economics or health care. However, all one needs to do is pick up a newspaper or watch the news to get a broad idea of what is going on in these areas. But it does make you wonder, how often are issues related to libraries spoken of in the news? Rarely, therefore, how much are we missing from other disciplines that we aren’t learning from current events or newspapers that is hidden or lost in the sea of information on the internet. With social media, the in depth knowledge Nicholson speaks of may not be found by everyone, but it can be shared widely enough that everyone can have the opportunity to learn about it.