I miss Encyclopedias

I fondly recall many a Summer day, hiding from the neighborhood bullies, with the brand new World Book Encyclopedias that mom ordered from Dorothy Fromholtz. You know how it is with the new stuff. You grab a book, flip through the pages looking at the photos to see where you want to start. Then you flip thorough really fast so that the pages fan your face and you get that Freshly Printed Book smell. I miss Encyclopedias.

Sure World Book wasn't the end all be all of collected information like Britannica was. Its what we could afford. And everything was in there. Fact checked and all. And every year World book sent a Year Book to update entries or add new ones based on what was going on in the world. Sure we have the Internet and Everything is out there. But how do you know that it is accurate. And how do you hold the Internet in your hand? How do you feel the weight of things as ethereal as electronic information? The world in your hands would have made a great slogan. Now you get the world at your finger tips.

But think about that usage. At your finger tips. When things are at your fingertips they aren't in your hand. It could slip away or you could try to grasp something and end up pushing it away instead. There is a reason that we use language the way we do. When the world used to pay attention to what was really being said there was less confusion. Everything means anything now and the clarity that language used to provide is getting muddied again. Information is closer than it used to be. People are closer than they used to be despite geographic distances. But the things that we want to know or need to know aren't as easy.

a google search can take forever to find what once required a glance through the index. Sure you'd have to look other things up in the bibliography and footnotes. But at least a weak entry in the World Book yielded a list of other resources for you to explore. If I want to know what schalger musik is I need to wade through a lot of useless info to find out. And the laptop doesn't feel like the passport to other countries that the book was. I don't know why it should be like that. But it is.