Vision 97 and knowledge

Last week I was at the Vision 97 ceremony, at which Paul Konrad Liessmann was awarded... I read in the materials that he writes a lot about knowledge and education, so maybe I should read something...

The times when there were polyhistors are gone... they knew a few information about a lot of things. Nowadays we have specialists who know almost everything about almost nothing...

What is better? Or can we even ask if is something better? Either way I still have respect for all people who are such Fachidiots in their field of work and yet they have vast knowledge about almost every science there is... but in my life I met only three of such people.

How not to get lost in the knowledge

Allegedly when Roland Barthes died, he had at home aproximately 15 000 index "cards" with different entries about what he was doing and when he was writing his non-fiction books he used these cards...

Looks like really painful-in-the-ass and slow process, but maybe he did not get lost in all that knowledge... nowadays I have a feeling that anything you want to know, you just type it in Google or find it on Wikipedia, but you "forget" it in the second you read it...