3 ms·

Somewhat in the same vein, previously the way to learn about something you didn't know about before would sometimes have involved reading a whole book on the to

Somewhat in the same vein, previously the way to learn about something you didn't know about before would sometimes have involved reading a whole book on the topic. Which would leave you much more informed than skimming some google result. I wonder if that sort of thing is more or less common today because people can sate their idle curiosity easier.

ergothus 11y ago
In my pre-web days, I found that generally you never found what you were looking for. First, someone would tell you "to look it up". So, travel to library, hit card catalog, find a few titles. Go to shelves. Somehow, 50% of the books from the card catalog wouldn't be on the shelves, but there also tended to be other books here that you hadn't found in the card catalog. Read books. While some topics were interesting, often you dealt with authors that did a terrible job of compensating for their biases, or did poor science. I have the same reaction to most news stories (which is why I hang out here :) ) It'd be like watching a 30 min youtube video while trying to find a single fact. End result: Still don't know your answer, learned some trivia, and have more disdain for the state of knowledge. I've found the accessibility of knowledge to be much improved these days, and have a better opinion of our collective knowledge as a result. I also still read a lot and gain a lot of trivia, but I'm generally reading material I'm more interested in. So I don't feel the internet-age has really hurt those areas.