Transcript
Speaker: Here are the categories for you. We start off with state capitals, followed by saints and sinners. Next comes artists, world history, hodgepods, and finally, Smiths.
Speaker: Bob, you were the first qualifier. You get to select first. Uh, Smiths for 1,000. The answer there is this. She wrote over 70 one-act plays, but is best known for her first novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Speaker: Eric, who's rich? You are right. state capitals I once carried a question for three years. Not a big question. Not a philosophical question.
Speaker: a stupid question. A trivia question. I was 11 years old, watching a movie with my dad. And I asked, is that the same actor from the other movie?
Speaker: My dad said he didn't think so. I thought he was wrong. We argued about it for 20 minutes. The shape of the jaw, the voice, the way he walked.
Speaker: We laid out our evidence like lawyers, like scientists, like two people who genuinely believed that the truth mattered. We never found out.
Speaker: We couldn't. There was no internet in our house. There was no IMDB. There was no way to resolve the argument except to let it sit.
Speaker: Unresolved. A small mystery between us. A tiny stone in the shoe of our uncertainty. Three years later, i saw the actor's name in a magazine.
Speaker: I was right. i remember the feeling. Not triumph, exactly, but completion. The mystery had matured.
Speaker: The question had lived in me long enough to become part of my mental furniture. When I finally knew, I felt like I had earned the knowledge.
Speaker: I'm Jeff Pavlisko, and this Xenialist, episode eight. The last time I didn't know the answer. Google as external memory.
Speaker: The death of wonder. Expertise in the age of instant information. I want to talk about what it felt like to not know. Not the absence of knowledge.
Speaker: Not ignorance. Not even stupidity. but the active living state of carrying a question without an answer. The specific embodied experience of curiosity before it became a search query.
Speaker: When I was a kid, not knowing was the default condition of consciousness. It was the water we swam in. We did not expect answers.
Speaker: We did not expect resolution. We accepted that most questions would remain open, that knowledge was scattered, difficult, partial, that the world was full of mysteries we might never solve.
Speaker: My family had a set of encyclopedias. The World Book, 1987 edition, burgundy covers, gold lettering, 22 volumes taking up four feet of shelf space.
Speaker: They were outdated the moment they arrived. They contained no information about the fall of the Berlin Wall. No DNA at evidence.
Speaker: No internet. But they were ours. They were a physical monument to the possibility of knowing a temple you visited when you had a question.
Speaker: Using them was a ritual. You identified the volume, A, B, c You pulled it down. You flipped to the entry.
Speaker: You read maybe three paragraphs. You found references to other entries. You pulled another volume. You followed the trail. It took 10 minutes to answer a simple question. 30 minutes for a complex one.
Speaker: Sometimes you never found the answer at all. Encyclopedias simply didn't cover it. And that was fine. That was normal. Not knowing was not a failure.
Speaker: It was not an emergency. It was not a condition requiring immediate remediation. It was simply the state of being human in a world that had not been fully indexed.
Speaker: Conversations worked differently then. I remember sitting in diners with friends, arguing about whether tomato was a fruit or a vegetable. Not because we cared, but because we didn't know.
Speaker: And not knowing gave the conversation somewhere to go. Someone would propose a theory. Someone else would challenge it. The debate would spiral, accumulating evidence, jokes, absurd digressions.
Speaker: we would build something together out of our collective ignorance. A cathedral of speculation. Now, that conversation lasts 45 seconds.
Speaker: Someone pulls out a phone. Someone Googles it. The answer appears. Botanically a fruit. Culinarily a vegetable.
Speaker: Here's the Wikipedia link. Here's the Snoop's articles. Here's a TikTok of a guy explaining it with a whiteboard. The conversation ends, not with a conclusion, but with a termination.
Speaker: The mystery is murdered. The wonder is strangled by efficiency. I am not anti-knowledge. I'm not romanticizing ignorance.
Speaker: I understand that instant access to information has saved lives, democratized education, empowered marginalized voices, made expertise available to anyone with a connection.
Speaker: These are real, material, political goods. I would not trade them for a return to the encyclopedia. But I want to name what we lost in the exchange.
Speaker: We lost the texture of not knowing, the social texture, the cognitive texture, the feeling of carrying a question like a weight, letting it shape your thoughts, your conversations, your relationship to the world.
Speaker: We lost the slow, organic process of discovery. The wrong turns. The dead ends. The accidental finding that only happen when you don't know exactly what you're looking for.
Speaker: Xenials, we are the generation that experienced this transition in real time. We remember card catalogs. We remember the specific tactile pleasure of finding a fact in a physical book.
Speaker: A pleasure that was earned, delayed, often disappointing. We also adopted Google early, enthusiastically, without reservation.
Speaker: We taught our parents how to search. We marveled at the magic of it. And now, now we are the generation that can feel the difference between knowing something and earning the knowledge.
Speaker: Between information and understanding. Between access and wisdom. Let's talk about what Google did to our brains. Not metaphorically, literally.
Speaker: There is a phenomenon psychologists call the Google effect, also known as digital amnesia. It was first documented in 2011, and the findings are stark.
Speaker: When people believe information will be available to them later, they are significantly less likely to remember it. They don't encode it. They don't store it.
Speaker: They outsource it to the cloud, to the search engine, to the external hard drive of the internet. This makes sense evolutionarily.
Speaker: The brain is lazy. It is efficient. It offloads tasks whenever possible. If you know you can look up a phone number, you don't memorize it.
Speaker: If you know you can Google a recipe, you don't learn the steps. If you know you can search for a fact, you don't internalize the fact. The brain says, why waste storage space?
Speaker: The internet remembers for me. But here's the Xenial glitch. We remember when our brains worked differently. We remember having dozens of phone numbers memorized.
Speaker: We remember knowing the capital of every state, the periodic table, the plot of every book we read in high school. Not because we were smarter, because we had to be.
Speaker: The information wasn't going anywhere. It also wasn't coming from anywhere. If you wanted to know something, you had to carry with you. Now, I know almost nothing.
Speaker: I mean, I know things. I know my job. I know my relationships. I know the specific curated set of facts that my life requires.
Speaker: But my general knowledge has atrophied. I don't know the capital of South Dakota. I don't know the name of the actor in that movie from 1987. Even though I could find out in three seconds.
Speaker: And I don't try to know. Why would I? The information is always there. Always available. Always ready to be summoned like a digital genie.
Speaker: My brain has learned to rely on the external memory. It has offloaded the work. It has become, in a very real sense, a search interface.
Speaker: A portal to knowledge. Rather than a repository of it. I want to tell you about a conversation I had recently. I was at a dinner party. Yes, I go to dinner parties.
Speaker: I am that kind of adult. I own cloth napkins and I use them. But someone asked a question about the Civil War. A specific question.
Speaker: a grandual question about troop movements or something like that. Before anyone could speculate, before anyone could propose a theory, before anyone could say, i think, or I read somewhere, three people pulled out their phones.
Speaker: Three people. Simultaneously. Like a synchronized swim team of information retrieval. The answer was found in 11 seconds. The conversation moved on.
Speaker: But I wanted to stay in the not knowing. I wanted to hear the guesses. I wanted to see who knew what, who was confident, who was full of shit, who had read a book 20 years ago and was trying to reconstruct its argument from memory.
Speaker: That was the interesting part. That was the human part. The answer, the correct, or verified, hyperlinked answer, was boring.
Speaker: It was a dead end. And here's what I think we're losing, the social function of ignorance. The way not knowing brought us together.
Speaker: The way a shared mystery created a shared project. The way arguing about something we didn't understand was a form of intimacy, a way of revealing how we think, what we value, how we construct meaning in the absence of certainty.
Speaker: Google didn't just change how we access information. It changed how we relate to each other. replaced the slow, messy, collaborative process of discovery with the instant, solitary, terminal act of search.
Speaker: we no longer wonder together we just look it up alone time for the zennial confessional this one is about knowledge about the feeling of not knowing about what we gave up when we gave up wondering and the listener wrote i used to be the smart one in my friend group not because i was especially intelligent But because I read a lot, I remember things.
Speaker: I carried facts around like ammunition. I was useful at parties. I was great at trivia nights. People called me when they needed to know something.
Speaker: Then Google happened. Suddenly everyone knew everything. My knowledge became worthless. Anyone could look up what I had spent years memorizing.
Speaker: I felt obsolete. Not just my information. Me. The role I played. The value I provided. The way I moved through social space.
Speaker: I became invisible. I stopped going to parties. I stopped offering answers. I stopped feeling like I had anything to contribute that a phone couldn't contribute faster.
Speaker: i know this is pathetic. I know I should have developed a personality instead of a database. But I miss it. I miss being the person who knew things. I miss the weight of knowledge in my head.
Speaker: Now my head feels light. Too light. Like something important floated away.
Speaker: Thank you, listener, for sending that in. I too feel the lightness. The sense that my mind has become a thin membrane. a barrier between the world and the internet, rather than a dense, complicated, idiosyncratic storehouse of accumulated, earned, lived knowledge.
Speaker: And I want to say something to that person, and to everyone who feels that way. Your knowledge was never worthless. It was never just information. It was yours.
Speaker: It was shaped by your interests, your obsessions, your particular path through the world. It had texture. It had bias. It had holes and wrong turns and stubborn certainties that turned out to be false.
Speaker: It was human. And the Google answer, the correct, sanitized, algorithmically optimized answer, is not human.
Speaker: It is a product. It is a service. It is not a substitute for the messy, particular embodied knowledge of a person who has lived with a question.
Speaker: Which brings me to I want to end with a question. The question I'm carrying into next episode. What are you afraid your kids will never experience? I mean this specifically.
Speaker: Not in the broad, sentimental sense. Not the joy of a summer day or the feeling of a book in your hands. but the granular, phenomenological sense, the specific, irreplaceable experience of a world that worked differently.
Speaker: Are you afraid they will never feel the weight of an unanswered question? Never know the social ritual of a bar bed that lasts all night. never get to experience the specific, triumphant pleasure of finding a fact in a book that no one else thought to check.
Speaker: Are you afraid they will never know what it means to be lost, truly lost, without a map, without a signal, without the safety net of instant rescue?
Speaker: Are you afraid they will never know boredom or patience or the slow, frustrating, necessary process of building something that cannot be undone with a delete key?
Speaker: Or, and this is the hard question, are you afraid they will experience something better? Something we cannot imagine. A form of connection, of creativity, of consciousness that is only possible in a world they inhabit.
Speaker: The world we built for them. The world we sometimes regret. And Zenyals, we are the generation that remembers the before and lives in the after.
Speaker: We're the translators, the witnesses, the casualties. And next episode, we're going to talk about the generation that comes after us, the digital natives, our children, or our friend's children, or the children we see on screens performing childhood for an audience of strangers.
Speaker: We are going to ask, What are we afraid they will never experience? And what are we afraid they will experience because of us, because of the world we made?
Speaker: That is episode 8 of Xenulous. The last time I didn't know the answer. If you have a confession and a question you carry too long, a fact you earned the hard way,
Speaker: A piece of knowledge that died when the internet took over. Send it in. I will read it. I will sit with it. I will not Google you.
Speaker: Next episode, the performance of parenthood. Raising kids in the intention economy. Screen time guilt. Digital Native Children.
Speaker: The fear, the hope, the exhaustion of being the last analog parent in a digital world. Until then, carry a question.
Speaker: Don't look it up. Let it sit in your mind like a stone. Let it shape your thoughts, your conversations, your dreams.
Speaker: Wonder is not a search query. It is a practice. It requires patience. It requires not knowing. The answer is not the point.
