Look It Up

There was a time when you had a question you had to go to the library to find the answer. The library was a place with all the answers in the stacks of books. Ask a doting old lady who would direct you to the Dewey decimal system of cards arrange by category. Once a number was found, the librarian would direct a page to find the book and bring it to the desk. There was an option to find a table and read in silence or check it out for a period of time before returning it under penalty of fines. Then the library would close until the next day.

A time consuming process but it was the only choice.

A door-to-door salesman who promised them wisdom for their intelligently struggling sons with a set of encyclopedias hooked my parents. Between the dictionary and the encyclopedia the answer was found, but with the cost of printing there was only one answer.

Schools also offered answers to questions as long as they were in textbooks approved by the region. Teachers taught what they knew and would try and define the answer when sometimes they didn’t understand the question. Depending on their age and wisdom, they could tell you history or direct you to the school library. Different teachers had different answers and there was no cross-referencing.

Then came the Internet, formed for sharing information.

And information it got. Facts and fictions and opinions and comments and photos and diagrams and instructions and point-of-views cluttered our streaming searches. Instead of one answer there were hundreds of variations that would change in a flash like a library with too many books.

All this technology is wonderful. Don’t have to look up every word because of instant checks of poor grammar and spelling, yet it tends to increase our searches for new discoveries. For the curious, the Internet is a wealth of information and a real time waster. For the frustrated, the Internet is instantaneous (if your provider has enough broadband).

Today just ask your smart speaker a question and in an instant Siri or Echo or Alexa or Claude or whoever will reply an answer (after searching through the massive Internet choices and choosing just the right one).

Now we are back to one question = one answer.

For your report footnotes a source path can be your smart speaker.

Now if technology can create a dog to eat your homework.