this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
561 points (92.8% liked)
Comic Strips
18098 readers
1852 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Thinking that people couldn't find things out before google is naive and just sets you up to believe whatever shit google tells you.
Getting misinformation from the internet is worse than not being able to find the information, and far worse than getting valid information you have to look up in a book/publication.
How about the misinformation from Uncle Mike who overheard your question and confidently spews you some bullshit? If it's not in the encyclopedia upstairs, most of the questions that cross your mind went unanswered or you took everyone at their word.
Sure, you write down important questions and topics, but this post doesn't seem to be about that.
Yeah this post is a joke and you're supposed to chuckle at it, but in Lemmy fashion, here we are dissecting the shit out of it. But hey, it's about discussion, I guess, and I'm certainly a part of it.
Or you didn't take everyone at their word.
I think there used to be a kind of mystery about things though, you could debate in a pub for hours on a subject where now there's a definitive answer available within seconds. That delay in accessing information was fun and led to all sorts of debates and wonder. I remember when the original Pokémon games came out on Gameboy and there were all sorts of rumours flying around about how to get certain Pokémon, missingno etc. you never knew what was real or not until you saw it with your own eyes. Now you go on Google/YouTube and someone's already done an hour long deep dive to prove/debunk everything. I think having all of this information at our fingertips has actually stunted our curiosity and drive to explore and experiment
Yeah! I mean, we had Alta Vista!
Yes and no, it was always technically possible to drive thirty minutes a way go to a library, find a book that hopefully has what you want in it, drive back read it over a weekend, drive back to the library drop off the book, return and waist ~3hrs of your life to Learn a factoid but the barrier to entry was much higher and esoteric knowledge was simply unobtainable unless you went to university. Radio and TV both helped tremendously but you were more subject to the opinions of the studio and politicians than you are now and you would still have to wait and hope something was relevant to the thing you don't understand, and even then most entertainment was not educational.
Or you had an encyclopedia and a variety of assorted reference books on your shelf at home. This is not really as much about information technology as it is about laziness and lack of curiosity. The same thing is a widespread phenomenon today, even with the internet.
The problem with those home encyclopedias was they were mostly a decade or more out of date. And only provided a very limited amount of information. Generally only a few paragraphs or a page at best. Reference books suffered the same problems of not being current. Turns out books cost money and knowledge ain't cheap.
The only reference book that I own that is even remotely up to date is the last Machinery's Handbook I bought. And even that is multiple issues behind now.
History doesn't go out of date. The speed of light doesn't go out of date. Sure, a lot of things happened since it was published so it doesn't have the latest stuff but that doesn't invalidate the information they have, and if a new regime decides to erase or rewrite parts of history you still have it in black and white.
We moved often when I was a kid. Every time we moved to a new city, the first thing my mom did was take us to the library to get us our library cards. We looked forward to each trip to the library, browsing around and picking out books to check out. We weren't just there to look up a factoid, but we did learn facts about all kinds of subjects and loved reading the stories, so we developed our literacy and spelling skills without even knowing it. The time was well spent and fun, certainly not a waste.
I love being able to quickly look up a factoid online of course but that isn't a substitute for reading books.