‘Why isn’t called e-pedia?’ shouts my frustrated colleague while pounding at the computer keyboard and trawling through Wikipedia in search for a crucial fact: Elton John’s real name. All it takes is slight misapprehension of fact during office banter and everyone is away, racing to find the fact first and, usually, heading straight for Wikipedia.

I’m quite certain it’s not just my office with a penchant for general knowledge and that this happens in offices – and beyond – nationwide (general knowledge hunting that is, not searching for Elton John’s real name, which is Reginald Kenneth Dwight, FYI).

Having all this information literally at our fingertips is liberating, fantastic and great for advancing your social status among office peers. But has the internet made our brains lazy and caused a decline in general knowledge?

The possibility that the internet is dumbing us all down isn’t a new idea. Google has been accused of making us all a little dumber, as this blog suggests. The debate surrounding the impact of Web 2.0 upon our culture and our brains has been going on since the internet was first born.

First and foremost, it’s useful to consider Plato’s critique of writing when considering our new communication revolution: he said that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things and our memories will become weak.  Now we have the internet, perhaps we can’t remember things and our general knowledge is weak. Simply, forms of communication evolve and people have to adjust.

Admittedly, our reliance upon the web and its wealth of knowledge means we don’t need to make an effort to remember anything at all. Next time someone asks me what Elton John’s real name is after all the kerfuffle in the office, I won’t be able to recall it from my memory. I can, however, surf straight to the relevant information via the web. I can also share the link and spread the information quickly via email, Twitter, Facebook. Indeed, we can share information like never before.

While we no longer have to work as hard to learn by sifting through hefty encylopaedias from the family book shelf, this hasn’t necessarily made us lazy or damaged our ability to learn via this new platform.

Most worryingly, a lot of information on the internet isn’t full of authority or particularly informed; the reason Wikipedia isn’t called e-pedia is precisely because it’s a Wiki. A Wiki is a tool whereby users write the entries; they edit and contribute to create content. This means someone could write a whole lot of rubbish. However, platforms like Wikipedia do have creditability in their ability to be self-regulatory.

Wikipedia has millions of articles written by its registered – and anonymous – users. Experts, academics and even average Joe Bloggs can edit entries and this keeps the flow of information alive. While those editions of encyclopaedias are getting dusty on the shelf, entries on Wikipedia are being continually revised and refreshed, providing the most up-to-date reflection upon all the facets of our society.

More so, the ability to learn new things is easier than ever before with so many other online resources and institutions – such as the Open University. Schools are even beginning to incorporate digital technology into the curriculum. As Victor Keegan recently wrote in The Guardian, “It is possible we are not far away from a revolution in which formal education will give way more and more to the attractions of internet learning.” While we may not have the need to commit general knowledge to memory (except when taking part in the occasional pub quiz), the internet hasn’t curbed our learning or dumbed us down; it’s increasing our potential. All we need to do is motivate ourselves to log on, get involved and adapt.

While contemplating all the learning to be had, here are a few useless pieces of general knowledge I stumbled across on the World Wide Web:

• In Slavic vampire folklore, vampires could take the form of butterflies.
• Pierre the penguin is the first bird to don a custom-made wetsuit (to combat bald spots).
• Captain Philip Beaver once read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica during one of his cruises – if only he’d had the internet, he could’ve saved himself the time…