The great unknowns

Have you heard about the invention that cures your smartphone addiction? Whereas normally you can’t go more than a minute or two without checking your phone, this invention allows you to sit with the thing safely tucked away in your pocket or bag, not giving it a second thought. The invention is known as the ‘quiz’.

You’d have thought that smartphones would have killed off this British institution. A pub quiz, with the answer to every question in the world just a fumbled, sneaky glance away? Surely cheating would become rife, rendering the whole exercise pointless? But that hasn’t happened. There’s something about a quiz that returns us to our pre-smartphone mindset, where if we didn’t know something, we didn’t know it. In fact we like being in this position. We love, to borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase, a ‘known unknown’. There is a joy in for once having to wait to find out.