If we think of “questions” and “answers” as stocks on the market, then we could say that, in this current environment, questions are rising in value while answers are declining. “Right now, knowledge is a commodity,”25 says the Harvard education expert Tony Wagner. “Known answers are everywhere, and easily accessible.” Because we’re drowning in all of this data, “the value of explicit information is dropping,”26 according to Wagner’s colleague at Harvard, the innovation professor Paul Bottino. The real value, Bottino added, is in “what you can do with that knowledge, in pursuit of a query.”
