Knowing what we know : the transmission of knowledge, from ancient wisdom to modern magic / Simon Winchester.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"A delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter . . . . Simon Winchester has firmly earned his place in history . . . as a promulgator of knowledge of every variety, perhaps the last of the famous explorers who crisscrossed the now-vanished British Empire and reported what they found to an astonished world." -- New York Times

From the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient museums to modern kindergarten classes--this is award winning writer Simon Winchester's brilliant and all-encompassing look at how humans acquire, retain, and pass on information and data, and how technology continues to change our lives and our minds.

With the advent of the internet, any topic we want to know about is instantly available with the touch of a smartphone button. With so much knowledge at our fingertips, what is there left for our brains to do? At a time when we seem to be stripping all value from the idea of knowing things--no need for math, no need for map-reading, no need for memorization--are we risking our ability to think? As we empty our minds, will we one day be incapable of thoughtfulness?

Addressing these questions, Simon Winchester explores how humans have attained, stored, and disseminated knowledge. Examining such disciplines as education, journalism, encyclopedia creation, museum curation, photography, and broadcasting, he looks at a whole range of knowledge diffusion--from the cuneiform writings of Babylon to the machine-made genius of artificial intelligence, by way of Gutenberg, Google, and Wikipedia to the huge Victorian assemblage of the Mundanaeum, the collection of everything ever known, currently stored in a damp basement in northern Belgium.

Studded with strange and fascinating details, Knowing What We Know is a deep dive into learning and the human mind. Throughout this fascinating tour, Winchester forces us to ponder what rational humans are becoming. What good is all this knowledge if it leads to lack of thought? What is information without wisdom? Does Rene Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum--"I think therefore I am," the foundation for human knowledge widely accepted since the Enlightenment--still hold?

And what will the world be like if no one in it is wise?

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Winchester's erudite and discursive latest history (after Land) aims "to tell the story of how knowledge has been passed from its vast passel of sources into the equally vast variety of human minds, and how the means of its passage have evolved over the thousands of years of human existence." He begins with a thorough examination of the very concept of knowledge, from its first recorded appearance (spelled cnawlece) in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles of 963 CE to T.S. Eliot's 1934 play The Rock, which today's information scientists view as a key touchstone in the modern theory of knowledge. From there, Winchester examines the education of children; sites of knowledge, including libraries and museums; formats for dispensing information, such as books, photographs, television, and the internet; types of manipulation, including propaganda and public relations; devices that assist human knowledge (calculators, GPS, artificial intelligence); and geniuses and polymaths like 11th-century Chinese scholar Shen Gua, who realized "the usefulness of the magnetic compass," and 19th-century British Army soldier James Beale, "a prescient campaigner for pan-African freedom." Though Winchester gathers fascinating and varied examples from throughout history and around the world, they don't necessarily add up to a cohesive thesis. Still, it's a stimulating cabinet of wonders. Photos. (Apr.)

Booklist Review

Winchester's oeuvre is a testament to his abiding interest in history, human innovation, and his distinctive ability to share his insatiable curiosity with enthusiastic readers. He has written engagingly about etymology, engineering, explorers, and inventors as well as maps, oceans, rivers, land, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Such polymathic inquisitiveness makes Winchester the ideal guide to explore the history of knowledge and its transmission through the centuries. Winchester's sheer joy in imparting what he learns is evident on every page, reminding the reader that knowledge was once predominantly employed as a verb. Winchester's ebullient style and countless irresistible anecdotes and strange facts inspire the reader to knowledge for themselves. We explore the origin, nature, and types of curiosity, track the founding of the earliest libraries and the destruction of these temples of knowledge by disasters natural and man-made. We trace the evolution of paper and are reminded that the Latin word for a tree's inner bark is liber. We follow information dissemination from Gutenberg to newspapers to Google to propaganda and fake news. Finally, in this technology-saturated world, we must ponder Winchester's existential query, "If our brains no longer have need of knowledge, and if we have no need because the computers do it all for us, then what is human intelligence good for?" Essential reading.

Kirkus Book Review

A study of the problematic nature of wisdom. Prolific historian Winchester brings his insatiable curiosity to a wide-ranging examination of how humans have acquired, retained, and passed on knowledge from ancient times to the information-saturated present. Drawing on abundant research and autobiographical reflections on personal experiences of learning, the author creates an engaging narrative populated by a vast array of individuals, including philosophers, religious figures, polymaths, inventors, and researchers from all over the world: Confucius and Aristotle, Charles Babbage and Thomas Babington Macaulay; Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Tim Berners-Lee, to name a few. Winchester examines the development of writing systems, the evolution of scrolls into books, and the various innovations for storing knowledge that have taken the form of encyclopedias, libraries, and museums. He considers the impacts of the inventions of paper, the printing press, and newspapers as well as the spread of misinformation and suppression of information by governments or political factions. Not surprisingly, he devotes much attention to computers, first demonstrated to an amazed public in 1968; the invention of hypertext; the founding of the World Wide Web; the release of Wikipedia in 2001; and the strides being made in artificial intelligence. Winchester's overriding concern is the future of thinking: "If machines will acquire all our knowledge for us and do our thinking for us, then what, pray, is the need for us to be?" If GPS makes map-reading an antiquated skill, if Wikipedia makes retaining information unnecessary, if calculators do our math problems, what happens to the capacity of our minds? "How, in sum, do we value the knowledge that, thanks to the magic of electronics, is now cast before us in so vast and ceaseless and unstoppable a cascade?" asks the author. "Amid the torrent and its fury, what is to become of thought--care and calm and quiet thoughtfulness? What of our own chance of ever gaining wisdom? Do we need it?" Erudite, digressive, and brimming with fascinating information. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.