Right now, if one desires, they can find information on many different subjects by just looking at their phone. It has never been easier to find out information on different subjects quite quickly, and it's possible to do it almost anywhere you are. So it's always disappointing for me to find people who will gleefully declare that they are unaware of something.
It's a trend I noticed a few years ago in the reaction to some awards at the Grammys, where some winners who were a bit more obscure inspired a number of people to declare, loudly, that they had never heard of the winning band. I thought it was quite silly - the band was performing at the show, now was their chance to hear of them - but I mostly ignored it, because I assumed that it was just an overblown response from people upset their favorite artist didn't win.
I bring it up now because it's something that I keep seeing, in all areas of life. For instance, a CBC online poll indicated that 80 per cent of people had no opinion on Saskatchewan's new Lieutenant Governor Vaughn Schofield, because they had "never heard of this person." This poll was at the bottom of an article about Schofield, which suggests that the people didn't bother looking at most of the words printed immediately above the poll before voting.
I'm not saying that people needed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Schofield before learning of her appointment. I didn't know who she was before the appointment was announced either, and I'm sure that many other people in the province didn't know much about her. That's perfectly fine, but now that she is Lieutenant Governor, it's quite easy to find even the most basic information about her, enough to get a basic idea of how well she might fill the role. Considering how easy it is to find information, just saying "I've never heard of this person" is a lazy way out. After all, now you have heard of this person, and here's an opportunity to learn about them, why not take it?
There are issues people have no interest in, groups they're not concerned with and parts of the world that they don't want to learn more about. People can't know everything about the world, and I'm not saying they should be expected to. My point is that there's no benefit in going to a place where information is found easily and then proudly declaring that you know nothing about it. That doesn't help anything, and it doesn't make someone look very intelligent - especially since the information they need to know is often right there, easy to find and understand.
It's becoming more difficult to say you don't know the details and implications of an issue, given how connected everyone is most of the time. I can understand not wanting to learn about certain events, or keeping away from some parts of our culture. But if one declares that they don't know or understand something, it is clear that it is a deliberate effort to avoid this information, since it's so easy to find out what it is. While it's acceptable to avoid minor things like the intricacies of tabloid fodder, there are going to be issues that actually will have an impact on people's lives. Proudly declaring one doesn't understand or know about these issues is no longer an acceptable course of action.
