But if you think about it, the review process was done because you can’t review later and retract something, and because it was likely to be a single source of information (or else it wouldn’t pass review in the first place because it was nothing new).

We’re now in an age of lots and lots of publications happening about a give subject and the trick is to determine if the publications are correct or not. Frequently all we have to go on now is the ability to rate the content based on how well written it is and how well it matches with the information presented in the other gazillion hits. This is probably not necessarily a bad thing if you actually did rank information by quantity but there are some things that get in the way of this. The first is laziness as once we find the information we tend to stop and assume the first hit is right rather than look at the first 10 hits or something. The second is that it’s too easy for malicious folk to actually flood the market with fake grass-roots reviews, etc, that overwhelm the information with a spin toward one direction or another (drug companies seem to excel at this by both posting positive reviews of their products but negative ones of competitor’s products).

A study was recently done (I don’t have a reference, but it was discussed on NPR) that showed we’re horrible at looking for a review of a product, for example, that matches the information we want to find. IE, we’re willing to keep reading negative reviews of a product until we find an opinion that matches the one we want to see. IE, humans are miserable at trying to take in the massive amounts of information and regarding it all subjectively as a whole. Until we get out of that habit, we’re probably going to stay in the middle of this transition for quite some time.

There’s a problem with people confusing information and knowledge (the juncture of information, experience and thoughtfulness), and everybody thinks knowledge is at our fingertips. Alas, only information is available, and it seems that the information is becoming more and more shallow and World Book-ish while more and more academic focus is set on information. Teaching knowledge — especially that thoughful aspect to it — is difficult to do in the best of times, and hard to test for on paper.

And that’s where my comment meets yours. People are querying the machinery of the internet for information, because they do not have /knowledge/ to know how to find the answers themselves… the thoughfulness or experience to connect what they do know (Shall I check the manual? Is it similar to this other issue?) to find the answer to their problem.

We are becoming very good at simple queries and poor at the synthesis of the resulting information into a personal knowledge pool, and without that ability, we simply repeat the query like rats pushing a bar until an answer appears.