A scary thing happened to me the other evening. I was working on stuff to fill the space between the ads and had to look up some factoid — I think it was something about Burrard Inlet. Google sent me to Wikipedia.After a quick flash of the listing: "Burrard Inlet is a relatively shallow coastal fjor..." It was gone. In its place was a black wall of no facts, obliterating my screen and leaving me with nothing but a giant "W" and this ominous message: "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge." A link below explained that Wikipedia would be blacked out for 24 hours. It was the Wikipedia community’s way of raising awareness about proposed legislation before the U. S. Congress that "could fatally damage the free and open internet." It was to last for only 24 hours but, because it happened on a school day, I predicted catastrophe. Where would billions of students around the globe turn to plagiarize their assignments? Where else could they find a concise paragraph on the arterial pathways of the fetal pig? Or the population of Luxembourg? Or, like, whatever. Bored with the global implications of the disaster, I turned back to my own predicament. Having no other choice, I scrolled down Google’s offerings to see if there was a possibility the intertube might still give up the answer. It did. About seven items down was a link to the publisher’s website for a book called Burrard Inlet: A History. That took me back. It also reminded me that the old fashioned paper and binding version sat less than two arm lengths away on my bookshelf. And it turns out this device holds an incredible amount of data. But it was a little unwieldy. After some fumbling, I remembered that its search functions were limited to an alphabetical index — in the back (which seems dumb). And the font size couldn't be boosted up so I had to squint to find anything. But the worst part came when I actually found what I was searching for. The book’s outdated cut and paste function made a big, gluey mess and I ended up having to retype everything anyway. But I got there. I suspect most students these days have dispensed with these antiques of the pre-information age. And though many will disagree, I don’t believe the quality of information has suffered that much because of it. When I was in high school — and university — the quality of research assignments was dictated by the availability of (usually) outdated print resources. When the deadline loomed, we just used what we had, whether it was a science journal published in 1968 or the Encyclopedia Britannica. Teachers understood this and acknowledged the limitations of research material by marking accordingly. As our dependence on the digital library becomes more entrenched, we may come to dismiss the mouldering stacks of print taking up space on our shelves.
But don’t toss them out just yet. The humble candle faced similar scorn when its limitations were first exposed by the electric light.
But I suspect candlelight also reasserted its usefulness during the first "blackouts" when someone needed to find some information. In a book.
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