Robert·ology

I’m seeing it all the time now. People are posting questions in online forums that could easily be answered with a little thinking or experimenting. But instead of exercising their cognition, the question is thrown to the world in hopes that the answer will effortlessly bounce back.

And that results in an answer but no knowledge.

This tends to come up in programming forums for one. Questions come up like “How do I do X? Will this work…” Well, did you try it? Did it work?

Just a few weeks ago, I saw another one of these. A question was posted, then the first reply twenty-two minutes later was from the original poster answering his own question. Twenty-two minutes. Some of that was waiting for a reply. Some of that was typing his own reply. Who knows what the rest was because it probably took two minutes to get his own answer.

If you want to know if something can be done, do it and find out. You’re bound to learn a lot more than just the answer.

Other times you’ll see a question posted and a quick reply of “Duh!” by the original poster. This is a case of asking yourself the right question.

Posting your question forces you to actually create the question. You may have been working for hours on a solution but didn’t truly know what the problem was. Next time this happens, go ahead and write it down or type it out, but don’t hit that submit button yet! Now that you have communicated your idea (to yourself) you might easily see the answer.

In another case of forum-pidity, we see someone asking the mass of world-wide internet users how his bank works. Why are you asking someone off the street? Did you forget where your bank is? Really, if you want to know if your U.S. bank can take a Canadian check (which in this case would be a cheque) - ASK YOUR BANK! I have a feeling they would know.

You’ll have to agree, some people online are just not as bright as others. We can’t all be above average - that’s not how “average” works. But I’m not saying these people cited above are indeed stupid. They could be heading that way, though. It’s a product of the times if you will. Relying on everyone else to figure things out for you will turn you into a useless bag of organs with typing skills.

So here’s a message to everyone using the internet, from everyone else using the internet:

We won’t do your homework. We won’t cut up your dinner. We won’t hold your hand all day. And you can thank us for it later.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 9:48 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.