Showerthought: I heard a kid ask 'what's a phone book' and it hit me

I was at the library last week and a kid, maybe 8, pointed to an old yellow pages on a display and asked his mom that. She said it was how you found people before the internet. It made me think about how this whole 'ask anything' idea has changed. You used to have to call information or look in a book if you had a random question. Now you just type it into a search bar or a forum like this. The answers come in seconds from all over the world. I wonder if getting answers so fast makes us value them less. What's the weirdest old-school way you ever found an answer to something?

2 comments

2 Comments

markm274d agoTop Commenter

Nah, getting answers instantly is way better lol. I remember having to dig through encyclopedias for school projects and it was the worst. Fast answers mean we can actually learn more stuff, not less.

oliver_ward144d ago

Honestly, @markm27 has a point about speed being better. I used to think all that old looking stuff built character or something. But man, trying to find a random fact in the 90s was a mission. I'd be stuck for an hour with a giant atlas just to figure out a capital city for some homework. Now you get that in five seconds and can move on to actually learning why that city matters. Maybe the value isn't in the wait, it's in what you DO with the answer once you have it.