Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

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A delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter New York Times

An ebullient, irrepressible spirit invests this book. It is erudite and sprightlySunday Times
From the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient museums to modern kindergarten classeshere is award-winning writer Simon Winchesters 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 maths, no need for map reading, no need for memorisation 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 Mundaneum, 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 Ren Descartes Cogito, ergo sum'I think, therefore I am, the foundation for human knowledge widely accepted since the Enlightenmentstill hold

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

Reviews

PRAISE FOR KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW:

An ebullient, irrepressible spirit invests this book. It is erudite and sprightly in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has read Winchesters wonderful histories of the Krakatoa eruption, the origins of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Atlantic (among others) Sunday Times

A book about transmitting knowledge by someone who has made his name by doing just that in the most erudite and entertaining way possible . . . 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 schoolhouses in ancient Sumeria and Aboriginal songlines to GPS, Wikipedia, Google and beyond, Winchester traverses the human history of information storage and transmission in a pageant of colourful, eloquent tableaux Dont pigeonhole Knowing What We Know as information science. Rather, think of it as an intellectual autobiography: one richly stocked, ever-curious minds account of the multiple ways in which stored knowledge may open the road to understanding Financial Times

Winchester is a knowledge keeper for our times, and he does us all a service by writing it down Wall Street Journal

[Winchester] might be appropriately dubbed the One-Man Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge of our own era. Whatever his subject, Winchester leavens deep research and the crisp factual writing of a reporter . . . with an abundance of curious anecdotes, footnotes and digressions. His prose is always clear, but it is also invigorated with pleasingly elegant diction Informative and entertaining throughout Washington Post

Author Bio

Simon Winchester is the bestselling author of ATLANIC, THE MAN WHO LOVED CHINA, A CRACK IN THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, KRAKATOA, THE MAP THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, THE SURGEON OF CROWTHORNE (THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN), THE FRACTURE ZONE, OUTPOSTS and KOREA among many other titles. In 2006 he was awarded an OBE. He lives in western Massachusetts and New York City.