The conventional wisdom holds that we can know anything and everything about the world around us without even trying. It’s all just a search box or a StreetView away. No need to memorize facts or master information.
The conventional wisdom has a point. Like everyone else my age, I sometimes have my breath taken away by the massive volume of things I no longer have to know by heart. Routine information that would have taken me half a day in the library to find takes seconds. Reference works that I pulled off the shelf constantly gather dust or have been long since given away. Those thick books of county or state maps I kept in the back wells of the car are gone, though I keep the old navigational and map-reading skills in practice sometimes on long exploratory drives.
And yet. We are also famously enmeshed in misinformation, in information war. As we once were—propaganda and deception are nothing new—but just as the volume of information we can accessed instantly is unprecedented, so is the volume of misdirection and lies. We’ve never been able to see so much video and information from an ongoing war as the one in Ukraine, but we’ve also never had so many efforts to manipulate global opinion with iconic scenes.
None of this is news. What I’m thinking about today is something else, which is the things which we still don’t know in an age of seemingly ubiquitous information. The most obvious is highly sought-after information that is being aggressively protected via legal and physical forms of secrecy. The powerful, whether governments, corporations or private individuals, can systematically and intentionally hide much more of their actions and thought from scrutiny.
Far less intentionally and systematically, however, much of everyday life is mysterious. If I drive between Philadelphia and Baltimore on the four or five major road networks that connect them: I-95, Route 1 (Baltimore Pike), Route 40 (Pulaski Highway), the loop through Delaware and the Eastern Shore that passes by Annapolis, and Route 30 to York and then down I-83, I will pass by retail businesses, infrastructure of various kinds, light industry, storage facilities for everything from individuals to massive inventories of commodities or raw materials, farms, private residences, buildings whose purpose or utilization is unclear, and huge expanses of fenced off or posted land whose ownership status is nowhere to be seen from the fenceline.
I can find out a fair amount of information about all of that from public records, but at least some of that information isn’t available through two or three clicks. I can guess at some of what goes on in many of those places through generalization and extrapolation: if I go by one Amish farm and I know something about Amish life, then I have information relevant to the next Amish farm I see.