Are we forever at the end of the Know-It-All?  You know the sort of person I’m describing, right?  The kind who always know the right answer to everything when asked and, if not asked, will offer up blind bits of trivia on their own accord from the dark recesses of history while simultaneously adding living citations and quotes from books, politicians and serving up sharp shards of microinformation that only encyclopedia writers need to know.

I actually love the Know-It-All because they are willing fountains of information and they have a knack for remembering the small things most of us prefer to forget. 

There was a time when everyone needed to have at least one Know-It-All in their lives to avoid having to go to the library or to crack open a dictionary.

I wonder if we’re now at the end of an Era; have we reached the nadir of the Golden Age of the Know-It-All?

With iPhones and Google and quick access to any bit of known fact or truth as close to us as a flick of a finger or two
— we now have the Information Age in our hand and the Know-It-All is irrelevant.

Who needs a Know-It-All when you’re your own Know-It-All and you have to personally remember nothing in order to earn the title?

Google is now your Know-It-All memory and search terms are your means of accessing what you think you know but cannot remember.

I mourn the end of the living Know-It-All because they were always lively and fun and full of quick information that could lighten your day in the right time and tide.  I have no idea what the Know-It-All will do now.  Perhaps write Wikipedia entries?

7 Comments

  1. There are so many things that Google and most search engines cannot find or struggles to find — or even worse, buries deep in a wealth of non-relevance — so I think the Know-It-All, with the ability to parse what is being asked from what is not — will live on. 🙂

  3. I come across them all the time so I will post here when I come across them! 🙂

  4. Okay, here’s one. I saw an ad for Jet Blue where it had a wooden spoon and I wondered if I could buy it. I searched for wooden spoon ad jet blue, spoon ad jet blue, spoon jet blue — it was very clearly a wooden spoon! No luck, nothing relevant.

  5. Hmmm… would a “Know-It-All” know that sort of answer, though? In my experience they know facts and bookish things — not necessarily places to shop.

  6. Here’s another one. There are so many television shows that I watched as a kid. Sometimes I will remember something that occurred in one episode — maybe one scene. Unless someone else had the thought to put it ‘out there’ only a die hard fan of the show, who wouldn’t necessarily be interested in putting his brain storage online, would also know. So frustrating — yet so rewarding when I go deeply enough that I happen to come across that one person who cared to share online.

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