Knowledge at Your Fingertips

People think knowledge is available at the click of a mouse. However, they fail to realize that most of the information available on the Internet comes from dubious sources. At some point of time they were lifted from books, mostly, through processes like OCR and simple data entry. In these processes of content transfer, errors and typos creep in. Again, various websites, to avoid legal implications arising from plagiarism, rewrite this content again and again till most of its essence and factual correctness is lost.

Students no longer read books, do primary research or experiment. They blindly believe in whatever is easily available on the Internet and that too for free. All that is needed now is a simple copy-paste. This habit is causing a knowledge gap in the present generation. The new generation no longer possesses problem solving aptitude. At the slightest inkling of doubt or query they run for their Internet enabled tabs, mobiles and computers. Imagine youngsters entering the job market with such limited knowledge and stunted intellect.

I realized this phenomenon bitterly while editing books written by both wannabe and established authors who churn out manuscripts simply by copy-pasting content from various spurious websites, blogs and forums. Without making so much of an effort as writing a single sentence or working out a sum, a book is ready--riddled with errors, misleading information and every mistake and blunder imaginable.