Americans are notoriously ignorant when it comes to understanding the world around them. Their thinking is not only provincial and short-sighted (not a welcoming fact considering the US military maintains more than 700 bases in about 130 countries around the world) but it is increasingly solipsistic. American culture is largely self-obsessed, ironic and impatient. Rick Shenkman addresses the idea of Ignorant America in an article posted over at AlterNet.

Shenkman points out that not only are millions of Americans “embarrassingly ill-informed” but “that they do not care that they are.” Why might this be? We are living in an age where more information than ever is instantaneously available (at least to most in the West) at the click of a button. The internet was supposed to free us of ignorance and provincialism, yet this hasn’t happened. During the post WWII period – the time for which social scientists have been measuring – degrees of ignorance have remained constant, despite higher levels of education and the more recent expansion of the internet.

In the 1990s, political scientists Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter concluded that there was statistically little difference between the knowledge of the parents of the Silent Generation of the 1950s, the parents of the Baby Boomers of the 1960s, and American parents today. (By some measures, Americans are dumber today than their parents of a generation ago.)

The consequences for maintaining democracy, which Shenkman addresses, don’t need to be repeated here. What is interesting to me is the utter failure of the internet to transform America’s historical ignorance, contradicting what many cyber-utopians have long claimed.

I feel the core issue is the tendency of people to equate information with actual knowledge. As one author puts it, “We are living in an age when we have GPS and Google maps at our fingertips, but most Americans are unable to locate Iraq on a map, even though we have been at war there for years.” Being inundated with information does not automatically make a knowledgeable society. One still has to know how to sift and filter through it all to find anything worthwhile. In short, you have to know what your looking for and how to get at it. High volumes of data don’t ensure we will be more in tune with the world, but can actually contribute to precisely the opposite.

Cultural critic Lee Siegel puts it best:

Information is diversion. The guarantor of a free society is knowledge. Knowledge shows the relationships between things, it gives things a moral and historical framework. The information itself doesn’t mean anything. In Germany in the 30s people had information about slave labour camps, about the beginnings of the concentration camps but it didn’t lead to anything because society had become unmoored from its moral and historical ballast.

The streams of information in this country which are supposed to be a further advance in democracy are really just creations of nervous media organisations which promulgate the illusion that we need to be plugged in, that we need to know everything that’s happening at every moment. But of course all that information distracts us from the things that really matter, we’re lost in the sea of it, we don’t know where to turn, we don’t have time to reflect, we don’t have time to turn these things into ideas or relationships that shed light on the big picture.

Technorati Tags: digitalization, democracy, internet