Mountains of knowledge
Within the mindset of our parents’ generation, being a well informed and cultured person meant reading a lot of newspapers and magazines, going to exhibitions, listening and watching news and opinion programs on the radio and on television, and discussing the current events and tastes within the immediate circle of family, friends, and even acquaintances. The selection of which sources of information to absorb was helped by the overall bias each person had in political, ideological, and aesthetic terms, and how well it aligned with the image they had of each source.
We’re living through a transition, made possible by the development of the internet in the past fifteen years. Some people still use the new medium as a digital replacement of the old system – they read online newspapers, chat with people they know personally, basically do online what they did “in real life”. But others, and you’re one of this group if you’re reading this, have adopted a completely new posture of being “well informed people”, taking the advantage of the p2p (person to person in this case 
) system made possible by *everyone* being able of becoming a source of information and creativity if they wish to do so, basically “for free”, in a whole range of different mediums.
This has created a wealth of available information, some of it excellent, some of it original, and some of it intelligible to non-experts outside each field, and we can discuss about what we learn with people we’ve never met before. This makes the selection of what we read or watch, and who we interact with, much more important decisions than they were under the old system, due to the sheer scale vs. the available time that we have. How do you personally handle climbing these mountains of knowledge?
First of all, welcome to “the long tail”. You should read it…
We’re better informed because there’s more information but also because now you can decide/filter what to read and where to read it whereas before you had to read what others chose for you.
Right now knowledge is a click away and although many argue that the knowledge of the masses can be tricky (for instance collaborative knowledge sharing in wikipedia) others say that it can be used as a starting point and you can go further and deeper as you wish.
The advancement was also in terms of “niche” markets and the democratization of publishing tools (specialized blogs for instance). Now everyone can write about what they want and even specialize in a given “niche” and it is up to the reader to give it credit and read it or not.
And how you get to what you want/need? Basically you go there through recommendations and/or our “friend” google 
The jump to the immateriality of the commerce and enjoyment of other media like music and video has had a much greater acceptance
well, i think there is no particular way to acquire knowledge. you can hav it either from watching or from reading or from your parents or from your society. it varies from person to person.
In this modern world, we want to keep touch with many people. We meet many unknown people by internet or other types of information technology. Via these we can learn many things. So we get knowledge from new form of technology as well as our parents.
Those who find the best answers to your questions will probably become the most influential people in this New Age.
Under the old system, as you named it, those who absorbed the most information and usually also produced some of it were called “Intellectuals”. How should they be called nowadays?
Bloggers? (ouch…)