Here’s something that doesn’t make sense: we have the entirety of human knowledge accessible from our pockets, and yet we’re arguably less informed than our grandparents who got their news from one newspaper and three television channels.

How is that even possible?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, particularly as I watch friends confidently share misinformation they found in thirty seconds of scrolling, while ignoring the thoroughly researched articles sitting right next to it. The tools are incredible. Our use of them is abysmal.

The problem isn’t access to information—it’s the opposite. We’re drowning in information, and most of us never learned how to swim. We confuse having access to facts with actually knowing things. We mistake skimming headlines for understanding. We believe that because we can Google something, we don’t need to retain it.

This creates a weird situation where people simultaneously know everything and nothing. Ask someone about a news story and they’ll vaguely recall seeing something about it. Press for details and they’ll admit they didn’t actually read past the headline. Question their understanding and they’ll say “well, I could look it up if I needed to.”

But that’s not the same as knowing. There’s a difference between information you can access and knowledge you’ve internalised. The former requires a device and an internet connection. The latter requires thought, context, synthesis. We’re very good at the former, increasingly bad at the latter.

Part of the problem is how information is presented online. Everything is optimised for quick consumption—short videos, bullet points, headlines designed to be scanned rather than read. This is efficient for certain types of information, but terrible for building actual understanding.

Understanding requires time and effort. You need to read deeply, think critically, make connections between different pieces of information. You can’t get that from a three-minute video or a Twitter thread, no matter how well-crafted. But those are the formats that dominate online discourse because they’re what the algorithms favour.

I notice this in myself. I’ll read a headline and feel like I understand a story, when really I just absorbed someone else’s framing of it. I’ll watch a explainer video and come away thinking I grasp a complex topic, when actually I’ve just learned a simplified version that’s missing crucial nuance. The illusion of knowledge is dangerous because it stops you seeking actual knowledge.

The other issue is information quality. We have access to extraordinary amounts of information, but much of it is wrong, misleading, or deliberately designed to confuse. And because everything looks equally credible online—professional journalism and conspiracy blogs are formatted the same way—we’ve lost the ability to quickly distinguish good information from garbage.

Our grandparents had limited information sources, but those sources had been vetted. If something appeared in the newspaper or on the evening news, it had gone through editorial processes, fact-checking, legal review. It wasn’t perfect, but there was quality control.

Now, anyone can publish anything, and it all competes for attention on the same platforms. The conspiracy theory gets as much visibility as the peer-reviewed research. The partisan hack gets the same treatment as the experienced journalist. We’re left to sort it out ourselves, and most of us aren’t equipped for that.

I was talking to someone who does AI project delivery about how their systems handle information processing, and what struck me was how much effort goes into filtering and validating data before it’s used for decision-making. They can’t just feed everything into the system and hope for the best—garbage in, garbage out, as they say.

We need similar filters for human information consumption, but we’ve mostly abandoned them. Media literacy education is minimal. Critical thinking skills aren’t taught systematically. We assume people will just figure out how to navigate the information landscape, despite it being more complex than at any point in history.

The result is a population that has access to unlimited information but lacks the tools to process it effectively. We’re like someone given a library card but never taught to read—technically we have access to knowledge, but practically we’re lost.

So what’s the solution? I don’t think we can put the genie back in the bottle. We’re not going back to three TV channels and one newspaper. But we can get better at managing the abundance.

That means being more intentional about information consumption. Choosing depth over breadth. Reading fewer things but reading them thoroughly. Prioritising quality sources over quantity of sources. Taking time to think about what you’re reading rather than immediately moving to the next thing.

It also means rebuilding some of the institutional trust we’ve lost. Not blind trust—institutions should be questioned and held accountable. But recognition that some sources are more reliable than others, that expertise matters, that professional journalism serves a purpose.

And it means teaching people how to navigate this landscape. Media literacy should be a core skill, taught as rigorously as maths or reading. Critical thinking about information sources should be second nature, not an afterthought.

We’re the first generation to face this particular challenge, and we’re figuring it out as we go. But we can’t keep pretending that access to information is the same as being informed. It’s not, and the gap between them is making us collectively dumber despite having the tools to be collectively smarter.

The information is there. We just need to get better at using it.