When life was full of wonder

Before the internet my mother wrote down things I asked about and we looked them up at the library on the weekend.

Amazing and delightful. Best mom ever.

Books. We had books. We still have them and they are great.

I love books as much as the next guy, but let's not pretend that they are even remotely comparable to the Internet in regards to information access. My family had an Encyclopedia Britannica, they were great for summary on certain subjects but they were far from exhaustive.
- But that’s exactly what an encyclopedia is. The internet isn’t Wikipedia. The real difference was that the library was now in your living room. You didn’t have to hope they had the material on hand and wait weeks for something specific if they didn’t have it already on hand.
  There’s also just the idea that, with a library, you already have to have an idea of what to look for. You’re always browsing by genre in an alphabetical, organized fashion. With the internet, it could become discovery-based. One link could lead you to 13 others and those all branched again. You never knew what to expect.
  A book contains either one really clear idea, or a reference with no substance to a bunch of random stuff.
- The encyclopedia could at least be expected to represent the best consensus opinion and facts about a particular subject though, whereas the internet requires an entirely different skillset to evaluate, and the encyclopedia article provides the context to ask a librarian for help finding more in-depth and also reliable information to expand your knowledge.
  I expected the internet to be a Library of Alexandria as much as the next person, democratizing access to information and making society really embrace intellectualism. And the good stuff is absolutely there to be found, but there's a lot of bs here on the internet too and intellectualism has been shown to be not as engaging as its counterpart recently. And engagement drives the dollars. Encyclopedias didn't engage in anti-intellectualism, nor did librarians. So while I get your point, I think it's not considering the noise factor.
  Edit: grammar
I just re-read Man in the High Castle which was written/takes place in the 60s.
One of the characters wants to know the name of the naval vessel that is currently in port in San Francisco. To do this, he has to call the local newspaper office on a telephone and ask them. Then they call him back with the answer.
Many parts of the book are anachronistic (because in this alternate reality, the Nazis are colonizing Mars), but I believe that part was accurate because I don't know how else you could get that information.
Yeah but we didn't necessarily have that book. And also, you had to know which book. So first you had to find a book that could tell you what kind of book to look in. And if you just didn't know how or where to ask the question, well. That was that.
And actually a lot of the books were just wrong but because those were the only books we had, welp. You just learned it wrong.
- most houses had encyclopaedias/atlas.
- A lot of our knowledge today will also be wrong in 30 or 40 years, that's how knowledge accumulation works over time in a healthy civilization (ok now that I've typed it, I can already hear and accept the criticism that we might not be living in a healthy civilization right now, but I think the point remains). Learning how to find information is an important part of the educational process, imho.
  Edit: also, as pointed out before I even commented, we had libraries.

You'd get a random call from your friend like, "Who was that actress in that ghost movie?"

"...Whoopi Goldberg?"

"THATS IT, THANKS!"

click

Huh. I would have answered Demi Moore.
- I would have answered Shelley Duvall or Sigourney Weaver.... then again, we barely had a phone we I was young.