The explosion of social media, of perfectly smart and optimized search engines, of Google’s slow and steady rise to the top of the information chain—it’s all probably a good thing. We use it, we love it, some of us make a living finding new ways to utilize it. Having information at our fingertips is still something new and utterly amazing. You hear a song you like at the bar, pull out your smartphone, fire up the Shazam app and 20 seconds later you not only know the band and song name, but you are part of their fan club, have downloaded the song and have reserved tickets to their next gig. And you never even MOVED.

Wikipedia’s million-plus pages of intertwined information makes us better informed than we’ve ever been. Arguing the facts over dinner has become a typing race to see who can humiliate whom faster with the facts. Intellectual superiority (at least in public) in 2012 is defined by iPhone typing speed and dexterity. One wonders if evolution will begin to favor quick people with skinny thumbs, eventually weeding out slower, fat-fingered people because they can’t Google fast enough and therefore don’t get to mate.

Where it’s heading is obvious, although none of us know what it will look like. The answers will always be there, hovering in front of our eyes like B-movie spaceships. All we’ll have to do is look at it, pass it on, and we have passed. Instant expert. It’s way better than ignorance, right?

Perhaps.

But what about the quest for knowledge? The actual quest as in “a long or arduous search.” And we’re not necessarily referring to the academic quest for the Latin root of the word “survive” or some scientific unlocking of a random genome (although these are clearly more important). We’re talking about our own personal mini-quests for knowledge. Things we would like to know.

Since this is a marketing blog and we do a lot of entertainment work, let’s take it down to it’s most basic level: being a fan.

Not even five years ago, it was much harder to be a real fan of something. Ten years ago, it was borderline really hard, and prior to that, you had to be a little weird. Knowing where the lead singer of Guided by Voices taught 4th grade before he became a singer took some digging. You went to shows, met other fans, gossiped and learned. You read magazine articles and kept them and read them again until you had absorbed the work of the writer so completely that they were practically your ideas. You worked for it.

It was total pain the ass, and people knew it, and you were rewarded by having those people say “Wow!” or “I didn’t know that” when you educated them on your specialty. Little victories, but extremely satisfying.

If it was something more scholarly, like, say Edgar Allen Poe you were into, well that took reading…books. Remember those? You’d recognize them by the smell. And you didn’t read just one. Because any devotee knows, the baseline for any perspective is reading at least THREE books about your subject, then you start the “cool stuff nobody knows about” phase. You dig for the trivial. You go back to the obscure. The mundane.

The short version: it used to be a lot harder to be a fan, maven, buff or devotee.

So this is a small moment of silence for the passing of the quest.

That said, nobody really knows anything, even experts, unless they were actually there. And is the stripe of a fan how much they know or how hard it was to learn it?

There’s a good chance less than handful of people on the planet were in Robert Pollard’s 4th grade class.

Now go Google “Robert Pollard” and “4th grade.”

Boom. You’re an instant expert.