If you’ve read the title and assume I’m going to date myself, you would be correct. As much as I try to imagine that I’m still young and adjusting to changes as though I’m in my thirties. I am not.
I can remember feeling like the most disadvantaged child because my parents never bought the set of encyclopedias from the door to door salesman. Like the other “poor kids”, we only had the one letter freebie they’d give out. They always seemed to give out the same letter because, like McDonald’s Monopoly pieces, even when you pool your pieces with friends, you’ll never have a full board.
I feel like a few definitions are important to ensure the accessibility of this post to younger generations.
Encyclopedia – There used to be printed books that provided everything you needed to know about things. Knowledge was grouped by letter so if you had the A encyclopedia, you could research everything from Ants to Arthritis in the same book but you couldn’t learn about Bees or Bell’s Palsy. Everything wasn’t advancing so quickly that as long as your encyclopedia wasn’t more than 5-10 years old, you could count on what was in it.
And, I guess i almost have to explain mcdonald’s monopoly pieces because even that has gone digital…
Door-to-Door Salesman – People came to your door to sell things. And someone was always home. And, we’d willingly invite these strangers into our home and offer them a beverage while they showed us why we needed whatever they were selling. (In those days, it was a man so we wouldn’t have called them a salesperson.)
Back to my story. When you had a report to do for school, you had to make sure that you got to a library to take out books to do your research. It was like winning the lottery when you had a topic where A – there were a number of books and B – they hadn’t already been taken out by others who had the same topic. If you didn’t manage to be able to take out any books and had to rely only on encyclopedias or other reference books, you couldn’t take these out of the library, so you had to have enough time to do all of your research in the library. The “good kid” crime in those days was trying to hide reference books in your bag so that you could take them home to finish your project.
Now, jump to 2024 and I’m embarking on many new things that require additional knowledge and it’s at my fingertips! There is so much free content out there and so many people willing to share what they know. (Yes, you do have to be confident in your sources and verify things in more than one place, but still, nothing like opening the encyclopedia to find out your topic isn’t in there or that the information was so out of date you fail the project, not from lack of effort but lack of accuracy in the only tools you had available to you at the time.)
For me, it started with YouTube. A simple google search brings up videos. You watch one and see the other suggested videos on the side. And then the clicking starts and soon you’ve subscribed to six channels and are now learning about something completely different.
From there, every piece of technology I come into contact with knows the kind of things I want to learn and I get Facebook posts about courses and tools, the search ads on websites keep showing me different products and companies that can help in my quest for knowledge. All of a sudden, it’s overwhelming how much information I have available. I have so many resources I don’t know where to start.
In the last three weeks, I’ve attended many free online webinars on organizing my things, learning tips and techniques for managing ADHD, countless courses, videos and downloads about creative writing, and a lot of random rabbit hole videos and websites. There isn’t something that has stumped me that I can’t find the answer to, as long as I knew how to ask.
And that’s the key. Most times when I’m stumped and staring at my computer screen, it’s because I don’t know that magic phrase to get what I am looking for. The other day, I was looking for a photo of a draw barrel, like is used for contests where all the ballets are placed inside to make a dramatic scene of spinning the barrel and selecting a winner. I searched draw barrel, it seemed like a good start and I got pictures of people drawing, of barrels, of people drawing barrels and of barrels that had been hand-drawn. No contest draw barrel. Each time I adjusted the phrase, I just got different things I didn’t want.
So, I guess that’s the new skill for this generation – the perfect search term to find answers. We had a version of this in my day, when you needed to understand how to use BOOLEAN search terms. I want this OR this, or maybe this AND this but NOT this. Now you can just phrase everything as a question. And even if you don’t want to have to type your question, you can just ask Siri and she’ll search it and tell you the answer.
I admit, it’s hard coming to terms with knowing how old I really am and knowing that some days I’m one shaking fist comment away from being the angry old neighbour on the corner.
But, on the other side. The access to so many things in so many different formats is incredible and I admit, I often find a YouTube binge more satisfying than a Netflix binge these days. My new challenge is moving from research to application, from consuming knowledge to actually doing something with what I know.
What about you? Does the massive amount of information and knowledge at your fingertips delight or scare you? Do you sometimes just miss not knowing things or relying on others to help?
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