Sum of all human knowledge not as fun as IM

The other night I was up late writing a brief, and I heard this noise on the other side of the house. Surprisingly, it triggered a 30-year-old memory I didn’t even know I had of the sound of a window breaking. Only not a real window. And not a real sound. An electronic sound effect of a window breaking. I had a vague sense that it was from some game I played as a kid. Was it a video game? Which video game? No, wait. It was a board game. A board game? That doesn’t make any sense. How could a board game have had sound effects? In the ’70s? And so it went until it slowly came back to me. Obviously, I put the brief aside and began to google—N.B. I think this is not capitalized when used as a verb, right? Is there even such a thing as a “proper verb”?—because I had to track down this ’70s wonder toy. And behold: Some guy has a whole awesome webpage about it that even has all the sound effects. So I’m not crazy.

Back in say, 1985, if I’d wanted to find the same information, the only way to do it would have been to ask a bunch of friends whether they remembered anything like this. Or maybe go to a lot of garage sales. Or look in the card catalogue for a book on old board games. I don’t know. The point is it that I couldn’t do it at three in the morning without even moving from my chair.

Ensign Chekov, while macking on some alien, foretold the Internet on an episode of Star Trek and it sounded utterly fantastic: “What I do not know I find out from the computer banks. If, if I knew nothing at all, I could navigate the ship simply by studying what is stored in there. They contain the sum of all human knowledge.” And Star Trek looks like The Flintstones compared to what we have today. The more prophetic aspect of the episode may be that my students exhibit the same blasé insouciance toward this astounding agglomeration of knowledge as Chekov did: Yeah, babe, it doesn’t much matter whether I know how to aim the photons or whatever because I can always just google it. More than once every semester, we’ll come to some legal-Latin term or ancient allusion that in prior semesters has been unfamiliar to most. So, I’ll ask what it means and get 100 looks of polite perplexity peering over 100 laptops that are right then wirelessly connected to everything you could want to know. And they will sit there waiting for me to tell them what it means. Then I’ll do the Exasperated Eye-roll® that one of the SDFla judges and I have competing trademark claims on and say, “Why don’t you ask that box in front of you?”

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” Sam Johnson wrote that. (Wikipedia has a page on him, if you’re curious.) Now that we walk around with entire libraries in our pockets, it’s easier to get along while knowing less. (E.g., the other day I was without my phone, and I couldn’t call a close friend with someone else’s. I didn’t forget my friend’s number. I’ve never known it. I’ve never had to.) Maybe, having been reared with the Internet at their disposal, the millennials have internalized what Chekov said. Now that practically everything is readily knowable, why bother knowing anything you don’t need to know? That was Holmes’ take (fictional Holmes, not juridical Holmes) on the whole will-this-be-on-the-exam issue when Watson was all aghast that Holmes didn’t know the Copernican theory: “‘What the deuce is it to me?’ he interrupted impatiently; ‘you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.’” The New Jersey Supreme Court was more sardonic and impassive than Watson: “A court will in general take judicial notice of and apply the law of its own jurisdiction without pleading or proof thereof, the judges being deemed to know the law or at least where it is to be found.”*

*Leary v. Gedhill, 8 N.J. 260, 266 (1951)