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“Knowledge is power.”

- Sir Francis Bacon
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“Now you’re playing with power.”

- R.O.B.
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Since the beginnings of Western civilization, we have understood that knowledge, like freedom, isn’t free. While we respect the time and effort it takes to learn, we long for a shortcut, a free sandwich from the lunch lady of the mind. Because it takes so long to acquire and because time is #1 on the list of finite resources, knowledge has always had value. Since the invention of writing, however, that value has been in decline. Thanks to modern technologies, individual facts are worth their weight in Zimbabwean dollars in today’s market. That devaluation has changed the way we work, the way we learn, and most importantly on a site about pop culture, the way we tell stories.
Ancient astronomers spent decades memorizing the sky. Their ability to predict eclipses, equinoxes and such made these men high priests. Then we invented writing, and suddenly, those young whippersnapper priests were spending their nights sitting on the couch, watching the latest episode of Gilgamesh, trusting in written sources for their sacrifices instead of the uphill-both-ways astronomy of their elders. A couple of thousand years later, Guttenberg opened up the whole deal to the plebians and suddenly, knowledge is off the gold standard.
“Books were prohibitively expensive in the so-called ‘good old days.’ In colonial America, in 1760, a cheap schoolbook cost twice as much as a good pair of leather shoes; Smollett’s Complete History of England cost as much as eighty pairs of shoes, six head of cattle, or thirty hogs. An ordinary laborer had to work two days to earn enough money to buy the cheap schoolbook, or 144 days to buy the Smollett. The modern innovations of mass production and marketing have brought down the cost of a paperback to only slightly more than the American minimum wage.”
–Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture, p. 52
These days, whatever the RIAA says, information is free. Google, Napster, Wikipedia and friends put all the world’s data on the internet and iPhone gave us free* and instant access to that information anytime and anywhere.
At lunch with a guy/girl who’s into Iraqi history? 10 seconds from now you can show her the Gilgamesh story in the original cuneiform.
Out for a fancy dinner that night and want to impress him/her with your knowledge of the stars? There’s an app for that.
Can’t think of any good pillow talk? Talk about the implications to society of the fact that the iPhone can now solve a Rubik’s Cube.
Now that your date’s over, we’re here to talk about pop culture, so let’s move on and take a look at how knowledge has been treated in our stories.