Recently I learned about Quora while reading a blog post by a woman whose writing I admire. In no time, I was signing up with the question-and-answer website and soon after was receiving daily digests of sometimes nonsensical but almost always compelling questions that were accompanied by sometimes nonsensical but almost always compelling answers. Here are some examples of the questions you would receive if you signed up:
- According to the theory of evolution, why do we die?
- What is the sickest thought you have ever had?
- What is it like to marry a doctor?
- How do I become an interesting person in real life?
- What’s the creepiest thing you have heard a child say?
- What are some bad experiences of guys who have a very hot wife?
- How does knowing the Latin origin of a word help me in any way?
- Why would my teen daughter keep urinating on towels in her room when her bedroom is right next to the bathroom?
- Is “Please find attached my resume” grammatically correct?
- How would a dog react if I tried to lick its face?
And Quora is not the only website of its kind; there are heaps of them. What I find more interesting than the actual questions asked and answered on these sites, however, is the fact that such sites exist at all. So I thought I would do a little thinking out loud about the appeal of reading random questions and answers, the latter of which, I’m sorry to report, are not always based in fact — and are not always grammatical.
I think our interest in reading random questions and answers has to do with our ever-increasing hunger for bite-sized, distractive information parading as essential information and with our brains’ shrinking capacity to identify what is genuinely important; to think deeply about a topic; or to make creative, thoughtful connections between seemingly disconnected ideas.
Peter Baskerville, who bills himself as “Teacher, Edupreneur, and Father of Three” and who has been “Top Writer” for Quora each year since 2012, maintains that the site (and, by extension, others like it) “fills a massive learning-needs gap that currently exists for the people of the planet.”
As an educator and as a longtime proponent of online teaching and learning, I think I might have a sense of what Baskerville means by a “massive learning-needs gap,” though I am hard-pressed to understand how knowing what it’s like for a man to have a “hot wife” is going to help me become a better-informed global citizen.
We have arrived at this moment in history with the attention spans of four-year-olds on a road trip who, from the back seat, call out absently to their parents in the front: “Mommy, can I still play with my dolls when I go to Heaven?” and “Daddy, why did you marry Mommy?” and “Mommy, will I turn colors after I die?” and “Daddy, what is a fish stick?”
ruminationville 