Mentally Stimulating Diversions

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?