I was just watching a movie and when the credits were
rolling at the end, a song came on that I liked. I took out my iPad, opened “Shazam”,
pressed a button and in 30 seconds I knew that it was “Cups” by Anna Kendrick.
Louise knew who it was earlier because it was written on the screen. Whether
Louise is smarter than I am isn’t the point. The point is that I just had to
press a button and the information I needed/wanted was there. This is a link to
the song.
It got me to thinking about a time before the internet. In a
similar situation I would try to remember some key words in the song and when I
saw my musical friends I would ask them if they knew a song with the words “When
I’m gone” in it. Inevitably they would say “How does it go?” They would say
this to humiliate me when I tried to hum the tune I’m pretty sure. They would
laugh and eventually they would start making suggestions which made little or
no sense. I would listen to the radio for hours, hoping that they would play
the song and if and when they did play the song, they might not mention the
title of the song. It would sometimes be months before I found out what the
name of the song was and by that time I wouldn’t know why I had cared as much as
I did.
That kind of thing happened quite a lot before the internet.
Sometimes you would want to know when Hannibal
crossed the Alps . We didn’t have a set of encyclopaedias
at home, so I would have to either ride my bike to the library or wait until I
got back to school. I could have asked mom or dad, but they would just tell me
to go and look it up. That was parent speak for “I don’t know.” Most of my
friends were idiots when it came to dates in history and pretty much most other
things. They were busy burning herbs. Sometimes I would remember to look it up,
but I was more likely to forget why I wanted to know in the first place.
You had to talk to people if you wanted to learn how to fix the
radiator back in those days. Now I can just go online and watch as many videos as
I want to about radiator repair. The other day I needed to take a copper pipe apart
and then re solder it back in the proper place. There was a time I would call someone
who had done plumbing and picked their brain about the correct way to join the pipes.
I just went online and watched a video or two. It turns out that I knew how to do
the job from helping my buddy when he was doing a water heater installation.
Not everything on the internet is right and sometimes it is
just wrong. You need to check out more than one source and if there is a
difference of opinion, you need to go old school and talk to someone that might
know. Sometimes that costs you a coffee, but more often than not it comes with
a pleasant conversation.
The internet is here to stay and so is instant knowledge. I
don’t know if that is good or bad…let me check the internet…
I’m still reading… there are a lot of different opinions.
Oh, just in case you were wondering, Hannibal Alps in 218 BC.
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