"A delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to
share with anyone you encounter . . . . Simon Winchester has firmly
earned his place in history . . . as a promulgator of knowledge of every
variety, perhaps the last of the famous explorers who crisscrossed the
now-vanished British Empire and reported what they found to an
astonished world." -- New York Times
From the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient
museums to modern kindergarten classes--this is award winning writer
Simon Winchester's brilliant and all-encompassing look at how humans
acquire, retain, and pass on information and data, and how technology
continues to change our lives and our minds.
With the advent of the internet, any topic we want to know about is
instantly available with the touch of a smartphone button. With so much
knowledge at our fingertips, what is there left for our brains to do? At
a time when we seem to be stripping all value from the idea of knowing
things--no need for math, no need for map-reading, no need for
memorization--are we risking our ability to think? As we empty our
minds, will we one day be incapable of thoughtfulness?
Addressing these questions, Simon Winchester explores how humans have
attained, stored, and disseminated knowledge. Examining such disciplines
as education, journalism, encyclopedia creation, museum curation,
photography, and broadcasting, he looks at a whole range of knowledge
diffusion--from the cuneiform writings of Babylon to the machine-made
genius of artificial intelligence, by way of Gutenberg, Google, and
Wikipedia to the huge Victorian assemblage of the Mundanaeum, the
collection of everything ever known, currently stored in a damp basement
in northern Belgium.
Studded with strange and fascinating details, Knowing What We Know is
a deep dive into learning and the human mind. Throughout this
fascinating tour, Winchester forces us to ponder what rational humans
are becoming. What good is all this knowledge if it leads to lack of
thought? What is information without wisdom? Does Rene Descartes's
Cogito, ergo sum--"I think therefore I am," the foundation for human
knowledge widely accepted since the Enlightenment--still hold?
And what will the world be like if no one in it is wise?
