Do you know how to grow your own food?  Do you know how to fix a car?  Do you understand the legal system?  Do you know how electricity and electronics work?  Do you know how to help in the healing of another person or other living creature?  If you've honestly answered yes to all of these then you are the uber-human and I hope to meet you someday to pay me gravest respects.  Don't bother to read this, you already understand all the issues.  The rest of us, however, do need to be discussing and thinking about this.
The questions I began with are the sum total, cause and effect, alpha and omega of the information vacuum, as I see it.  Of course, the list goes on and on and on: do you know how to distribute food, do you know how to build a network, do you know how to balance the books, et cetera et cetera et cetera.  There are so many incredibly varied skill sets required for our incredible world that no one person could or should have them all.  Do you know how to rip metal out of the earth. do you know how to kill and butcher animals, or kill and butcher trees, do you know how to pursue and catch law-breakers?  It isn't possible to do it all, nor desirable.  And so specialization has spiraled.  There are practitioners of some kinds of medicine who can't even meaningfully contribute to the treatment of problems outside of their sphere of expertise, who might in fact cause more harm than good.  And this is true of almost any profession these days.  I myself do not fully understand a few types of data networks, and I will happily help you find someone else who does.  Do you understand the degree of specialization we're talking about here?  I hope to get better at growing food and fixing my car, but I don't expect to become a doctor anytime soon.  Nor an expert in VINES networks.
This specialization has both formed and been formed by our system of education.  This directly contributes to the spiral.  If you want to know about something outside the realm of your expertise odds are good that you will be able to find some sort of reference material.  If you seriously want or need to jump careers you can be re-educated so that you might honestly say that you have more than one expertise.  But it's still specialization.  And the books grow more specialized too.  And, here's the piece of the vacuum most people seem to stress: the books are going digital.  Lectures are going digital.  It appears that we are trying to get all the learning of humankind online, and it sure looks like a great deal of it is being neglected and destroyed in the process.  And once it is successfully digitized the original is very often discarded.  We are putting the benefits of our tens of thousand of years of experience into devices which are made of electronics, which run on electricity, which run software that is very quickly obsolete then unsupported, which rely on software that is generally capable of (some is prone to, I would say) quick, devastating or absolute destruction of that information.  But this is only one of the benefits accruing from our super-claculator/filing cabinets.
Another notable feature of our relationship with these digital-lack-of-intelligences is the absolute excess to which we have taken our dependance.  It is utterly impossible to fill a grocery store's shelves without the aid of the microchip these days.  It is, in fact, impossible to design a higher-performance microchip without the aid of a microchip.  And as the ever greater availability of detailed information drives us to greater and greater specialization, as we commit more and more of our knowledge to machines which fewer and fewer of us truly understand, as we allow our entire way of life to rely upon these non-renewable resources, we help build the vaccuum.
So, it seems obvious to me, technology must offer its own solution or undoing.  Understand that it is a choking plethora, treat it as such, treat it as the ultimate random access library, don't waste your time and life, and spread your own words with these same wide open standards.  html could be the thing that makes online storage useable.  It's certainly helped me.  And it has allowed me to back my work up across the world as you hit it and suck it into cache.