[rustynails]

There's another category that fits beautifully with this article. Critical thinking. The article focuses on knowledge domains. It would also benefit from discussing the ability to correlate facts or deduce conclusions based on prior knowledge.

I often talk about domestic violence because it's a fundamental issue of ethics: why all western media outlets only focus on fully grown white women, ignoring government bureaus of statistics that dispel such an obvious fallacy that drives victims to be starved of funding and support based on their sex. What we see is that the ability to critically think, to correlate information, to ascertain truth (even when presented with hard numbers from an authoritative source such as governments) is compromised.

There's a deeper issue beyond knowledge domains. Is this linked to a change of emphasis/importance in our virtual society? Are we becoming encyclopaedias of partial truths (ie. knowing lists of discrete information without aggregation and without deeper understanding)?

The Internet opened up a new world. There are many fewer older people on the Internet. That collective wisdom that comes with age is often lost. I don't know if it's this collective loss of knowledge on the Internet, whether it's Facebook's filters that only tell a person what they want to hear, whether it's information overload, or a combination of factors that appear to have changed our focus from gathering knowledge to gathering information.