- cross-posted to:
- comics@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- comics@lemmy.ml
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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.
That’s true! I’m married to a librarian and she’d love to help you find information!
But in the 80’s she’d help you find the sentence about your topic in the World Book. And put your name on the list for the book they had about the topic that’s been overdue for a year and a half.
Encyclopedia?
Every book on gender identity and women’s rights?
(You know, the ones that conservatives keep trying to ban/burn)
Yeah, but then you’ve got to go to a library, which is great and all, but you might not get to that during the commercial break.
Well they do have shows, movies and documentaries available for checkout; so you can avoid all commercials and get more of the content that you love.
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.
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The problem with those home encyclopedias was they were mostly a decade or more out of date.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.
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.
How about the misinformation from Uncle Mike who overheard your question and confidently spews you some bullshit? If it’s not in the encyclopedia upstairs, most of the questions that cross your mind went unanswered or you took everyone at their word.
Sure, you write down important questions and topics, but this post doesn’t seem to be about that.
Yeah this post is a joke and you’re supposed to chuckle at it, but in Lemmy fashion, here we are dissecting the shit out of it. But hey, it’s about discussion, I guess, and I’m certainly a part of it.
Or you didn’t take everyone at their word.
Yeah! I mean, we had Alta Vista!
Motion to change it to “before Wikipedia”, since that’s not evil
Wikipedia is way better for learning shit than google anyway.
Especially lately
Libraries and encyclopedias. We had a set of encyclopedias, New World I think, and much later got Brittanica on CD-ROM.
I lived in Pittsburgh during my formative years. Pittsburgh has an awesome library system, with world class libraries like the Carnegie library, and each universitie’s libraries, plus all the local libraries. I spent quite a bit of time in these. The net adds convenience, and some niche things, but it’s not the information, it’s having it in your pocket.
Also, you have to sift through a lot of bullshit.
That’s dumb. Houses I recall from childhood in the '80s were filled with books. Encyclopedias for kids, books about animals, history, etc. Libraries were a walk away. Schools had libraries (and in my case, the librarian looked just like Janet from Three’s Company and built the same. I was at the library a lot.). TV had plenty of educational stuff.
And how’s the newfangled Google knowledge world panning out so far? Lots of people getting informed?
you mean houses you go to now aren’t filled with books? I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have at least a small book shelf.
Nope. Far fewer. Houses are built to be showcases for expensive appliances these days.
ah, well, I’m also of a demographic that doesn’t know anybody with a new house either.
When I moved in 2016 I didn’t have a place to bring all my books so I got rid of my bookcase and most of my books. I filled a suitcase with what I kept and I think that suitcase with what I refused to get rid of at the time. After another couple moves that suitcase kept getting lighter. Eventually if I own a house I’ll start collecting again
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.
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?
Call for minutes!? That was expensive and in my small town everyone would know what i was searching for in no time.
Assuming you lived in a place with access to a library like you mentioned, that is. For me, libraries were a once a month thing growing up.
Where I am, I don’t think there are many towns without a library. I grew up laminate poor in the 90s, and even we had encyclopedias.
*I was going to say dirt poor, like dirt floor poor, and the basement was dirt and stone, but the kitchen had laminate. So it was more like post economic boom poor. Laminate poor, eh eh
I could imagine some more rural areas of the world not having access to libraries in their town, or being too broke to afford encyclopedias and other books, or having parents who don’t put importance on it. I’ve met too many parents today in that last group.
Even so, I used my school’s library more than the town one growing up. I’d hope your school had one
I really wish this just said life before the internet.
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.
I definitely notice that wonder has died with a lot of people. Luckily I try to be a luddite and enjoy life without tech as well as with. Still have tons of books. Shut the internet off every so often.
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.
The library is how people learned things before a search engine came and ruined people’s ability to find things on their own. Dewey Decimal, bitch.
And now LLMs came and ruined people ability to think. Idiocracy was a prophecy CMV.
