There's that one video where people went around a college campus an interviewed people, asking them a history-based question and a pop cultured-based question, and, of course, many people were stumped with the history question, yet readily provided the answer to the pop culture question.
And everybody seems to be in a disapproving uproar about it.
Okay but what did we expect?
What I take from the video is that it was meant to emphasize the fact that the everyday person in current society knows an incredible deal about useless, irrelevant (but current) events and people, even when they lack knowledge of more important events from previous years.
But again. What did we expect?
On magazines in the checkout aisles and articles shared on our social media, we are so prone to involuntarily viewing these pieces of information about the lives of celebrities. There's no way to avoid it without being specifically intentional. There's nothing wrong with that. It is only an indication of being observant.
Much of what we know about the world is discovered through what we happen to stumble upon. That being said, it is natural that we have a more complete knowledge of current events and culture, compared to history. We see and take in news. News articles are not being written about historical events. That's not what news is. That's not the way it works.
We don't see magazine covers that describe events in history. News headlines don't draw us in to read about the years in which past wars began and ended. This information is simply not readily available to us, and this is why the common person generally does not have an answer about these subjects prepared to present when prompted.
