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needed to do was get up off your arse, travel to a library, (business hours only), and dig through a card catalog for outdated information on the subject you were interested in. Bonus difficulty: Needing to wait a week for your library to get the outdated book you needed because it was in a different town.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?
Y’all heard of librarians right? They do a little more than stack books. Most are accredited professional researchers who can find what you’re looking for, or try to get it for you.
Talk to more humans and kindly please support your local libraries.
It blows my mind that people don’t know you need a master of library science to be a librarian. I still remember some reddit chucklefuck talking shit about librarians and literally stating that it’s not like they even need college degrees.
I mean I’m not gonna go ask a librarian how big of a laser I’d need to destroy the moon or why “1”+" 1" is “11” but “1”-" 1" is 0 in JavaScript
I’d appreciate those questions as a librarian. Problem is finding a publisher who was willing to print that information.
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.
I seemed to have no issue back in the day finding what I needed. Just not as easy.
Yeah, this has nothing to do with the internet. It is just about lazy vs. not lazy. The exact same scenario happens today, despite the internet.
Honestly though, you could never be certain how accurate it was. You could be certain it was probably several years out of date.
My parents got my sisters and I the digital Encyclopedia Britannica and purchased any available updates. Pretty fucking sweet, looking back on it.
Same as the internet then.
Far more trustworthy than today. For books to be published they had to be reviewed and accepted by a publisher and then they were copy-edited for accuracy and consistency. Not like now where you can write any pile of crap you want (or have an AI generate it) and self-publish it to Amazon or whatever.
I know too many people who do the same thing despite having smartphones.
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.
Motion to change it to “before Wikipedia”, since that’s not evil
Or just “the internet”
Wikipedia is way better for learning shit than google anyway.
Especially lately
I really wish this just said life before the internet.
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.
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.
Encyclopedia Britannica was the answer.
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.
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.
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.
How to say you’re young without saying you’re young, lol. Some people, boomers even, remember a time before Google existed and people used other search engines.
And before that we had tiny wikipedia’s written on paper.
Or you could ask that one friend
I’d askjeeves all sorts of things. Or hotbot. Or yahoo. I think MSN even had one. I think the term Google is the same as Bandaid at this point, and synonymous with Internet search.
I appreciate the sentiment though. Did many research papers in school where it was go to library, get books, quote them, place citation in bibliography. I enter high school in 2001 and Wikipedia is a thing, and that was that. We had been “allowed” to cite websites at that point, and while Wikipedia was off limits, some of us would just jump down the wiki article to it’s citations and use those.
But yeah, I remember the days of writing papers in a library, that or using Encarta. Encyclopedia Brittanica or Encarta.
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.
I think there used to be a kind of mystery about things though, you could debate in a pub for hours on a subject where now there’s a definitive answer available within seconds. That delay in accessing information was fun and led to all sorts of debates and wonder. I remember when the original Pokémon games came out on Gameboy and there were all sorts of rumours flying around about how to get certain Pokémon, missingno etc. you never knew what was real or not until you saw it with your own eyes. Now you go on Google/YouTube and someone’s already done an hour long deep dive to prove/debunk everything. I think having all of this information at our fingertips has actually stunted our curiosity and drive to explore and experiment
As someone who was definitely born with internet being a standard in my house and school as a child, this is sad. I loved going to the library every week with my dad and older sister, and we both loved encyclopedias and non-fiction books about animals and stuff. Recently I had to use my college library for a practice exercise for my Eng class and once we learned the system they use (it’s not Dewey Decimal), my partner and I had a blast looking for books for our papers. It was fun, honestly. It really made me realize that sometimes the internet is less efficient for finding quality and trusted information rather than perusing the library catalogue (which I can do online too obvs).
