So hypothetically, let’s say you’ve just had a bad cut on your knee after falling over during a walk. In this situation, would it be useful if I told you ‘Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo on the 18th of June, 1815’? No. It would be more useful for me to tell you that I had plasters or dressing.

What I’m trying to say here is that knowledge is useful all-around, it is the context that specifies how useful that knowledge is, in another situation you could be taking a history paper with a napoleon question and the example of waterloo I gave earlier would be more useful then.

This can be applied universally, and even clickbait articles like ’12 facts that are completely useless’, can in some contexts have equal use as knowledge as any other. Even stories that are distorted, such as the Sun newspaper’s reporting on the Hillsborough disaster, can have use as knowledge.

In brief, a football stadium in Hillsborough was overcrowded and people were crushed as the game went on; trying to escape, people jumped over the barriers onto the pitch where the police overlooking to game beat them with their batons thinking the intention was malicious.

The Sun newspaper reported that it was entirely the football fans from Liverpool’s fault, and that they were ‘football hooligans’. This resulted in the Sun being frowned upon in the city, and the Sun newspaper even lost a few legal battles over the controversy. The knowledge of the distorted facts from the Sun’s reporting can be useful as it shows how Media can manipulate and audience, and it’s effect on whole communities of people.

In conclusion, this all shows that all knowledge can be useful no matter what, and it all depends on the context when it comes to what knowledge is more useful than the last.