Some intriguing new research is making the rounds on social media today that offers truly startling insights into the the current nature of our society: According to a groundbreaking study, despite the fact that everyone is now able to use technology to easily get an answer to any question imaginable, everyone still has no fucking idea what is going on.
This is absolutely fascinating! It’s amazing how oblivious we all can be even when any information we could ever want or need is instantaneously available to us.
“According to our findings, although everyone now has access to the totality of human knowledge and can use the internet to find out literally anything, everyone remains completely baffled by everything that is going on at all times,” said Dr. Maggie Neilan, a data scientist at the Pew Research Center who helped lead the study. “Whether people just neglect to look up the answers to their questions or simply fail to understand what they’re reading, all the things that are going on everywhere remain more or less completely opaque to everyone.”
The study also found that, in addition to having no idea what was going on, people also found everything very scary. The researchers pointed out that these feelings of confusion and fear existed despite the fact that at any given moment throughout the day, people could reach into their pockets, pull out their phones, and access full explanations of everything from quantum mechanics to the complete history of Ethiopia.
“On the whole, we just don’t ever know what’s happening anywhere ever at all,” noted Dr. Nelson. “It doesn’t matter how good search engines get or how many new articles get added to Wikipedia. We are simply clueless and terrified about the things that occur around us, with very little insight into what is occurring, why it is occurring, and what, if anything, we can do about it.”
This explains so much! If you’ve ever felt like nothing makes any sense and that all the stuff that happens is hopelessly disorienting, it turns out you’re not alone. Just because we spend most of our day connected to a global computer network that can answer any question we could possibly dream up doesn’t mean we have any coherent account of reality. There’s a huge difference between being able to find things out and actually know what’s going on—and it’s so cool that there’s finally a study confirming what we’ve suspected all along.
