We live in the future; a town I've never heard of in the middle of Australia, and 30 seconds later I can see a map of it, view aerial photography, and read about its history and its surroundings. I've been reading about the Simpson desert and other geography of the area.
My little group's lunch conversation earlier in the week started with "How much would you pay, in 1985, to have the iPhone in your pocket with similar network access to that period's knowledge?" Opinions varied; intrinsic knowledge is interesting, but a lot of the interesting stuff involves access to people. It might be little more than a novelty.
But it's easy to forget how fast and accessible things are today. When I was 10 my parents bought our family an encyclopedia, a significant amount of money for knowledge that was of high quality, and readily accessible by walking across our living room, but years out of date. For anything better you had to drive across town to the library, when it was open, and hit the stacks.
I'm not sure that fast-and-vast is always compelling (the downside? you chase trivia and entertainment a lot, probably). But if I'd had StackOverflow in 1985 . . .
We live in the future; a town I've never heard of in the middle of Australia, and 30 seconds later I can see a map of it, view aerial photography, and read about its history and its surroundings. I've been reading about the Simpson desert and other geography of the area.
My little group's lunch conversation earlier in the week started with "How much would you pay, in 1985, to have the iPhone in your pocket with similar network access to that period's knowledge?" Opinions varied; intrinsic knowledge is interesting, but a lot of the interesting stuff involves access to people. It might be little more than a novelty.
But it's easy to forget how fast and accessible things are today. When I was 10 my parents bought our family an encyclopedia, a significant amount of money for knowledge that was of high quality, and readily accessible by walking across our living room, but years out of date. For anything better you had to drive across town to the library, when it was open, and hit the stacks.
I'm not sure that fast-and-vast is always compelling (the downside? you chase trivia and entertainment a lot, probably). But if I'd had StackOverflow in 1985 . . .