Thinking that people couldn’t find things out before google is naive and just sets you up to believe whatever shit google tells you.
Getting misinformation from the internet is worse than not being able to find the information, and far worse than getting valid information you have to look up in a book/publication.
Yes and no, it was always technically possible to drive thirty minutes a way go to a library, find a book that hopefully has what you want in it, drive back read it over a weekend, drive back to the library drop off the book, return and waist ~3hrs of your life to Learn a factoid but the barrier to entry was much higher and esoteric knowledge was simply unobtainable unless you went to university. Radio and TV both helped tremendously but you were more subject to the opinions of the studio and politicians than you are now and you would still have to wait and hope something was relevant to the thing you don’t understand, and even then most entertainment was not educational.
We moved often when I was a kid. Every time we moved to a new city, the first thing my mom did was take us to the library to get us our library cards. We looked forward to each trip to the library, browsing around and picking out books to check out. We weren’t just there to look up a factoid, but we did learn facts about all kinds of subjects and loved reading the stories, so we developed our literacy and spelling skills without even knowing it. The time was well spent and fun, certainly not a waste.
I love being able to quickly look up a factoid online of course but that isn’t a substitute for reading books.
Or you had an encyclopedia and a variety of assorted reference books on your shelf at home. This is not really as much about information technology as it is about laziness and lack of curiosity. The same thing is a widespread phenomenon today, even with the internet.
The problem with those home encyclopedias was they were mostly a decade or more out of date. And only provided a very limited amount of information. Generally only a few paragraphs or a page at best. Reference books suffered the same problems of not being current. Turns out books cost money and knowledge ain’t cheap.
The only reference book that I own that is even remotely up to date is the last Machinery’s Handbook I bought. And even that is multiple issues behind now.
History doesn’t go out of date. The speed of light doesn’t go out of date. Sure, a lot of things happened since it was published so it doesn’t have the latest stuff but that doesn’t invalidate the information they have, and if a new regime decides to erase or rewrite parts of history you still have it in black and white.
Have you not ever been to a library?
Librarians are the best people to talk to about finding information about where and what is available for you to learn more.
Seriously get to a library and talk to them, they are wonderful.
Libraries and encyclopedias. We had a set of encyclopedias, New World I think, and much later got Brittanica on CD-ROM.
All you needed to do was get up off your arse, travel to a library, (business hours only), and dig through a card catalog for outdated information on the subject you were interested in. Bonus difficulty: Needing to wait a week for your library to get the outdated book you needed because it was in a different town.
Today all information is available at any time-- 24/7365. Bonus difficulty: Sorting through all the AI bullshit to glean the correct information on a subject you know very little about.
Don’t you know the Dewey decimal system?
And you still have to go to a university library if you want any scientific papers and research knowledge, because most of it is behind a paywall and only universities can afford to subscribe to the journals.
Motion to change it to “before Wikipedia”, since that’s not evil
Encyclopedia Britannica was the answer.
I remember they used to have door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. Thinking back on it, we had book stores back then, so people could have gotten encyclopedias from there, so how did encyclopedia salesmen make any sales??
At any rate, at some point, my parents had purchased a short set of encyclopedias. They weren’t as good as the ones at the school or library, but it was something like 4-5 large books.
And despite what people think today, I don’t think those encyclopedias were as good or as accurate as Wikipedia is today. Wikipedia is so nice. If you want to know more about a part that’s not covered well in the article, you can just go look at the source.
You had… a dictionary at home, maybe an encyclopedia, but if you didn’t you could call a librarian and ask them if they had any reference on any topic. It took minutes when they were opened rather than seconds any time but… no ads, no tracking, serendipity yet no distraction, was it actually worst then?
This comic is stupid, and likely a made to farm comments and up votes, if there weren’t enough curious people willing to put in effort to learn we wouldn’t have advanced as much as we have today and no doubt Google makes looking things up easier, but look around you, how many people actually bother to even do that, plus it also makes it easier to find results that people can feed into their own misinformation, that they’ve predecided is the right answer
For context, this comic was made before Google changed their company motto away from, “Don’t be evil”. There was a sense that they might not turn evil back then and they were still giving reasonable search results based on your query.
I was watching an old movie last night and there were short references to odd things like one was a book from the 1890s.
When I saw the movie for the first time back in the 1980s I probably had no idea why the book was referenced and would have assumed it was made up as filler.
Now, armed with the internet, I can look it up and immediately understand that the script was still trash.
