What Silver Spoon?

It's an old phrase used to describe people of privileged backgrounds. The kind of person who has always had everything they wanted and needed, though those two may not be the same thing.

Those are the enviable, and not so enviable, people who are born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

They are perhaps the kind of people everyone wants to be because they don't have to worry about getting anything.

But when it comes to information, far too many people seem to think they need to be "fed" everything on a silver spoon.

I find this tendency to be quite annoying because I am a very independent woman. I don't like to rely on other people if I can avoid it. And while it isn't easy for me to do, I do know when to ask... Even if it makes me uncomfortable.

When it comes to information, if I don't know what something is or understand an idea, then I go and look it up.

Thanks to the Internet, there is plenty of information available, literally at your fingertips! You just have to be a little careful of the information you look at because sources online may not be reliable.

Despite the fact that not all the information on the Internet is reliable, it is there and easily available.

For an example, I saw a comment on an online story a while back that kind of irritated me. The story was about HOV lanes in Northern Virginia. The person's comment was basically a demand for information on what HOV lanes are. Actually it was more of an accusation that the news outlet wasn't providing enough information.

I am old enough to know what HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) and HOT (high-occupancy traffic) lanes are, though they have existed for almost twice the number of years I have been around. And with just a few quick key strokes, I was able to look up even more information than I could possible want to know about HOV/HOT lanes.

I personally believe that it is better to seek out information for yourself rather than sit around and prat that I don't know what something is because people won't tell me.

I see a word I don't know... A good old dictionary will help solve that. And if my old hard copy of the dictionary doesn't have the word (which does sometimes happen, especially since language changes - see my last post - and words come into the language or drop out), there are quite a few online dictionaries you can use.

I see a topic I don't know much about... A quick Google search will probably bring up lots of resources about that topic, which I can then peruse at my leisure.

For an example of one of these, anyone who has seen the special collector's edition of James Cameron's Avatar will have seen the scene in which Jake talks about the Hallelujah Mountains and what holds them up. He says Grace told him it was a MagLev Effect.

Now I had an inkling of what that might be, but I wanted to check. So I looked up Magnetic Levitation, because that was what I thought it was. Turns out I was right, but I still looked it up!

No one told me to do so. I did it on my own for my own personal edification.

Why am I making a point about all this?

The ease of access to information is one part of my point.

But the other part is that these kinds of comments are being made on online stories. That means who ever is posting those kind of comments is using a computer, a modem, a browser... This means that person has almost instant access to a whole lot of information.

So posting something that in essence is accusing a news organization of not posting enough information is kind of silly, don't you think?

Information is readily available. You don't need to have it fed to you. Look things up for yourself and draw your own conclusions based on what you learn.

There are many points of view you can select. Please try not to limit yourself to only things that make you feel comfortable. Comfort can be misleading and change is rarely comfortable.