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?
