IT HAS no Wikipedia page.
Every time I find someone who has not yet heard about it, I feel a wave of revulsion and awe at the sublime innocence of the noble savage. I feel like a preacher and a pusher all at once.
I dimly recall a time, in distant prehistory, when I spent my free time on Internet TV or playing guitar or reading dumb webcomics: those days are gone. QWOP and Too Many Ninjas are facile and hollow. Even pornography has lost its allure. It has changed everything. I am, at once, both baffled and shamed by the profundity and depth of my addiction.
I started as a casual user, I guess. A social user. It was a fun thing to do with my roommates, or while having a beer with a friend. But it wasn't long before I was doing it alone, compulsively, and in more and more inventive ways. Because the vanilla stuff wasn't taking me as far, see. So I found new ways to play, skirting closer and closer to the abyss--until this morning I found myself labelling a map of Africa, hastily scrawled across a notebook, at 10 AM in the middle of a lecture. I got every single country, although I switched Benin and Togo.
It is not complicated. In fact it is dazzling in its simplicity. It has no music, no robots, and hardly any bacon. But what it offers is even more compelling: the opportunity to learn, and to prove how much you already know. It is fast-paced, which is one reason it's more fun than going to class; it is easy to learn facts through repetition in a way that understanding relationships through explanation is hard. Since it categorizes and quantifies knowledge, it makes comparison and competition--both with others and with oneself--much more convenient. You only got 175? I got 184! It systematizes trivia--and unlike Jeopardy!, it also democratizes trivia. Everyone can play, as many times as they want, without fee or penalty.
But how should we interpret this renaissance of rote learning, precisely when it seems least important? The same Internet that allows games like these to explode into popularity renders the trivia gained therefrom utterly redundant and worthless. As fast as I can hit ctrl-t-maps-africa, I can check what that blob north of Ghana is. (It's Burkina Faso.) If I ever needed to know--perhaps to make some prediction about Ghanian emigration or border policy--I could find out instantly.The Internet--really the mass availability of information, a movement which much predates even Al Gore--has changed the game of thinking from knowing things to knowing questions. It doesn't matter whether or not I know what the 25 largest standing armies are, as long as I know it's important to find out when I'm trying to form an opinion about the Koreas (#4 and 6).
The second problem with rote learning is that I don't know anything about Burkina Faso other than where it is. (True, it only takes a ctrl-t-wk-burkina faso to find out it's a semi-presidential republic with a population shy of 14 million, formerly called Upper Volta and independent from France in 1960, and that its capital is Ougadougou. But the argument is the same.) Is there a process through which this kind of trivia knowledge gives us a false sense of knowledge, or even of action? Is it a basically patronizing, even imperialist position to pat oneself on the back for a comprehensive knowledge of the Dark Continent, given the reality that a lot of people don't even know as much about Burkina Faso as I do? Is this the same as arguing about the sociology of the ghetto with only The Blueprint and Low End Theory as credentials? For that matter, is there a risk that trivial knowledge of African geography lulls us into a sense of self-satisfied complacency? Sure, I don't volunteer, but how many of those Save Darfur clowns know where Malawi is? (The only slightly more sophisticated rationale is: by learning where countries are, I can help later. Is that any less pathetic?)
What is the future of the fact in an Internet world? What is the role of geography--which can only be learned by rote; that's why it's a good example--in forming good ideas? Why do I love Sporcle so much? And what is the capital of Burkina Faso?
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8 comments:
Time for an intervention?
I enjoyed a lot of the sporcle games the first time I played them, some the second, and some even the third. Now I've started to lose interest.
I enjoy sporcle because it's a test of what I already know, not because it's a memorization tool.
I got 175 (note: I did not), you got 184? I'm more impressed by the person who got 175 on their first try than the person who got a full score on their eighth try. But this is obvious, I think. In a month, I'll probably still know all 175 - but in a month, will you remember all 184?
Even if you were able to retain the info, I still wouldn’t be satisfied. I agree with one of your concerns - it's not real learning. Neither is the short wiki tidbit you provided. The capital and size of the population don’t provide us with any information about what BF’s like. Wiki says that Burkina Faso is poor, and that a lot of people leave Burkina Faso. While this is a little more useful, it still doesn’t tell us much. What's it like to live there? Is it shitty? Are people happy? Do people get along?
Wiki doesn't know, sporcle doesn’t know.
Sporcle’s fun, but it doesn’t teach us anything.
And if sporcle’s making the rest of the internet seem dull, you need some better internets. I hear there’s a guy by the bus station that’ll sell you some on the cheap.
Oh, and geography? I'm sure it must be more than just rote memorization.
Jeopardy > Sporcle, therefore democracy = worthless? MY ARGUMENT IS INFALLIBLE.
wb: okay, okay, democracy has some worth
I mean
without it, we wouldn't have the daily show
so okay.
icgyabl: nah i mean
i think that sporcle does teach
and that the fact that BF is poor and that three million BF citizens live in ghana (mind you, i read that this morning and retained it) DOES tell you that it's shitty
in other words
trivial facts can be--must be--combined to give higher level insight
wb: can tell you that it's shity
shitty
CAN.
icgyabl: uh
ok
not does?
i mean it did
wb: I don't think so, not necessarily.
icgyabl: that's how i know
wb: haha
Maybe people from BF really love Ghanain food
and there are high tariffs
icgyabl: yeah okay
wb: so because they are poor
and love ghanain food so much
they move
icgyabl: but like
wb: it's a very good indicator that life is shitty
but
icgyabl: that is another trivial fact
that we could obtain
sporcle 2010: can you list the countries with the highest arbitrary tariffs?
but that's something a sane person would not have suggested as an explanation
wb: I think Burkinians (what the hell do you call them?) loving Ghanaian food is a little closer to this "real" knowledge I'm getting at
icgyabl: unless they were being a wiseass
or already knew because of trivia games.
People are going to have to read a lot of uninteresting babble in order for them to see that you've called me a wiseass - but hey, we're bloggers. It's our prerogative.
For the record, I haven't watched The Daily Show in... probably more than a year and a half.
There are a couple points I want to address, but I'm far too tired to make any sense. Will elaborate later.
ICGYABL, last night I was telling you about an idea called "the extended mind", I don't know if you remember because you got distracted by Sporcling "They Might Be Giants Studio Albums". Basically what is proposed is that the mind doesn't necessarilly end where the physical brain stops but things that external stores of information can constitute a portion of the mind as well. I copied this thought experiment from wikipedia to help explain:
"The fictional characters Otto and Inga are both travelling to a museum simultaneously. Otto has Alzheimer’s Disease, and has written all of his instructions down in a notebook to serve the function of his memory. Inga is able to recall the internal instructions within her memory. In a traditional sense, Inga can be thought to have had a belief as to the location of the museum before consulting her memory. In the same manner, Otto can be said to have held a belief of the location of the museum before consulting his notebook. The argument is that the only difference existing in these two cases is that Inga's memory is being internally processed by the brain, while Otto's memory is being served by the notebook. In other words, Otto's mind has been extended to include the notebook as the source of his memory."
Anyways it seemed pretty relevant - perhaps we shouldn't be arguing about whether or not Sporcle constitutes learning, but rather whether or not it is actually a part of our minds merely by virtue of our internet connections. To me though it seems fairly insignificant if sporcle is a part of my memory, I am still required to manipulate those facts in order to do anything other than sporcle with them. However, when I consider such things as things as that website that did my calc homework for me last year, or a simple pocket calculator for that matter, the idea of extending my mind becomes more problematic. Those things are replacing a mental process that I could have (maybe) done without them. When a calculator spits out a sum I have the same belief in the truth of the result as if I had done it myself. I fact most of us would have more confidence in the calculator than our own arithmatic. By that logic then, and under the assumption of an extended mind, the calculator is perhaps a higher ranked portion of my mind than the part that "knows" how to differentiate.
Spooky.
Now that is a cool concept. I only got partway in the original post when I claimed that the important thing isn't knowing, it's asking: the critical third element is indexing. If I had all the facts known to humanity in spiral notebooks but without a comprehensible way to find information about specific topics--in expanded mind terms, if I knew everything but could never remember anything--then I would be no better off for it, except insofar as I could learn/recall things at random as an amusement. That is, I suppose, why people are willing to invest in a company that makes it its business to index the world's brain.
But perhaps this model is not as comprehensive as I had thought at first. It's all well and good to have the capital of Burkina Faso--or the square root of 10, or a summary of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism--at one's fingertips, and in some ways I'm sure that is changing the way we think, or at least the way we think about knowledge. But what about the kind of non-trivial knowledge, the kind that will never be a question on Jeopardy! because it isn't an answer to a question and cannot be reduced thereto? Is there such knowledge? Or is all knowledge based upon statements?
Can you think of anything you know that can be communicated but is not the answer to a question?
human feeling, interaction, love, yadda yadda yadda
sporcle doesnt have them blah blah blah
but its still cool yammer yammer
OUGADOUGOU
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