McLuhan was, I guess, the first to express the insight that technology is an extension of the human body.
These hand-held gadgets for communication might very well represent the end of ‘understanding’ for almost all citizens by 2050. I can see it already on the Internet discussion forums where communication is becoming a stream of consciousness without coherent grammatical or thoughtful content or construction.
I am going to deal with numbers and ratios not that I think my numbers are accurate but I think they may be useful for comprehending certain things.
Suppose we establish a knowledge-to-understanding ratio K/U, i.e. the amount we know divided by the amount we understand (i.e. need to create).
I would say that a frontier family might have K/U ratio of 20/1. As time passes and there is less need for understanding (creativity) and more need for knowing because the demands of the frontier diminish and ‘civilization’ encroaches I would say the K/U ratio might go to 50/1.
After one hundred years I suspect the ratio might easily move to 100/1; after leaving the farm and moving to town and going to work in the factory the ratio might very well go to 1000/1.
Today’s modern man or woman may very well have a ratio of 10,000/1. The person with a PhD might very well have a ratio 100,000/1.
I have heard college professors say that you never really understand a subject until you try to teach it. I suspect a PhD who is also a long time teacher might have developed an understanding of many things and thus dropped the ratio back to 10,000/1.
I think that within the next 50 years ‘understanding’ will be only seen in a museum. Do you agree?
