When I was a kid, my mom told me a story about her first year at Vassar. She was getting acclimated and finding the work a bit overwhelming at first. One of her assignments was to read a book and be ready for an exam. It was particularly difficult reading and she struggled through the exam, feeling very dissatisfied with the result. To her surprise, she got an A while every other single person in the class failed. It seemed that the cliff notes of the book had a bit of storyline that did not exist in the original. One of the questions on the exam made specific reference to that bit of story and my mom left it blank. She was the only one that read the book.
I was talking with a friend of mine who is a retired literature professor. He was telling me that it used to be that an educated person would at least have to be familiar with all the bible stories, the classics and Greek and Roman mythology. She would have to be versed in all the themes and characters. Before she could presume to call an idea her own, she had to be aware of the whole range of ideas that had come before. When it came time to publish an idea, there was a process of editing and review, by someone else.
Nowadays, anyone with the even the faintest notion can push a few buttons and spew it all over the universe. Someone who has never gotten out of their barcalounger is now having their opinion on world politics featured on CNN. Social media and, yes, blogs have inundated the human race with a flood of useless nonsense. The exaltation of the self that I mentioned before, along with exponentially progressing technology have enabled the huddled masses to publish without having read the book.
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