I was reading in a book some stories of the phycisit Richard Feynman's childhood, and i read this part:
"Knowledge was rarer then. A secondhand magazine was an occasion. For a teenager merely to find a mathematics textbook took will and enterprise. Each radio program, each telephone call, each lecture in a local synagogue, each movie carried the weight of something special. Each book Richard possessed burned itself into his memory. He and his friends traded mathematical tidbits like baseball cards, a boy named Morrie Jacobs told him that the cosine of 20 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 40 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 80 degrees equaled exactly one eight, he would remember that curiosity for the rest of his life. For now, knowledge was scarce and therefore dear. It was the same for scientists. The currency of scientific information had not yet been devalued by excess. For a young student this meant that the most timely questions were suprisingly close to hand."
This part made me think, because i find this concept often, reading it or just thinking about it in the metro, while i watch other people (or myself) get completley absorbed inside their smartphone.
Was Richard Feynman so lucky to live in the era where you had to spend the perfect amount of work to find informations? Was there a moment where the ratio of the difficulty of finding information to informations available was optimal? In a sense i really think the answer is yes (maybe not really Richard Feynman early days, but you get the point).
I think that having to struggle to find what you are searching for is a great way to attribute a certain value to it, and if you want it, you have to work for it, nobody with a bit of brain would do all of this work for nothing. If something is difficult to find, you have to wait for it, it has a different meaning, it is scarce, and it is valuable.
In 2025, anyone with a smartphone and internet connection, could gather enough informations to become a phycisit, an aerospace engineer, an artist, an electrician, basically anything you could imagine, it's right there on the internet... but still most people just use it to watch other people photos, cats photos, etc. The fact is that information have been devalued (at least in perceived value) by excess, it's so easy to find what we are searching for that it just doesn't make sense to spend energy to remember it, we'll just search for it the next time. Would a 10 years old Richard Feynman nowadays remember the cosine trick? or trade mathematical tidbits like trading cards? (probably yes)
Either way, i'm writing this just to say that i think that the (almost) total accessibility to human knowledge has actually made it worse for people (on average) to appreciate,treasure and profit from all of this. We don't even realize how lucky we are, and the amount of power we have in our own hands.
Or, to sum up my thoughts, as John Gleick wrote in "What just happend? a chronicle from the information frontier":
"When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive"
I think about this a lot, and i feel it a lot, find myself navigating in useless endheavors, looking at things i don't wanna look at, or listening to stuff i don't care about. It's hard to give my unconditional attention to something. Having infinite possibilities brings somehow the mind to not being able to choose, or focus, and to just superficially touch things, without spending the time needed to get something out of it. So for these and other reasons i think that especially in the information era, less is more, at least for me, that's why i don't want to use social networks, or the smartphone, it's because information has become meaningless, it costs nothing to share what you think with other people, and anybody can disseminate everything without even thinking about it. There's no incentive in thinking well and hard before sending something to someone, and the result is that we lose a lot of time, just because there is no cost in broadcasting new informations, and we don't think about the time other people spend because of this, i want to stop spending that time, and concentrate.