CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Encyclopedias Won't Make Sense in the Future

Friday, February 22, 2008

this entry brought to you by foo fighters, "lonely as you"


Sometimes you hear about the way things used to be, and the concept doesn't make any sense to you. Let me give you an example. My mom was telling me about the days before paper towels, and I was flabbergasted. The idea that you had to wipe everything clean with an actual rag seemed strange, but then when you think of all the applications for the paper towel, it becomes staggering. What did people do to wipe oil off their hands when eating fried chicken, for example? Or potato chips? What did people put bacon on when they were done cooking it? And again, every single little spill that happened, you'd have to use a real rag for. The idea of not having paper towels seems bizarre to the point that you just assume they always existed. Or disposable diapers. I know some hippie parents prefer cloth diapers, but 95% of all parents in America use disposables, and the idea that there was a time when you only could use cloth diapers seems creepy and strange.

I was trying to think of things that I would have to explain to my children that would be inconceivable to them. A lot of things are going to change by the time my child grows up, but there are still things that are conceivable, if antiquated. CDs will probably always make sense, even when nobody uses them. I don't think my child, once grown, will have a hard time grasping that before you could just click a button and get music, there must have been some sort of storage thing with which to put your music on.

Then I thought of encyclopedias. With the entire nation's population able to use the Internet with ease-- even people that are homeless have email accounts, because they can easily just walk down to the library-- the concept of information is different than it once was. If you want to know something nowadays, you just type it, and then read to your heart's content. This was even true before things like Wikipedia. Information-- all of it-- was right there.

But it didn't used to be that way. People used to own encyclopedias. And the weird idea isn't that there used to be these giant, bounded books with information in them, but the fact that people owned them. If you think about it, this was fucking weird. Most people owned encyclopedia sets. But the point is it was kind of a point of pride, and a bit of a given. Everybody had them. These gigantic, inconvenient, expensive books that would be outdated the instant they reached your home. And I don't just mean expensive, I mean really fucking expensive-- 200 bucks for a whole set, or easily more! Can you imagine nowadays dropping 200 bucks just for information, especially knowing that in a changing world, lots of stuff in it would be out of date within an extremely short period of time? And when I say "inconvenient", I mean really inconvenient-- they were hard bound books that were fucking gigantic, each one easily the size of a dictionary, and there were thirty of them! You would have to go out and buy a special book shelf just for the set. And if you ever moved from where you lived, you inevitably ended up missing one or two volumes, and they were never the ones you could live without, like W-Z, or Q. And of course, since they were so fucking expensive, you couldn't just easily replace missing volumes, you would just go without. And encyclopedias were so ubiquitous, poor people even had them. My mom taught at a very, very low income school in the South Central side of El Paso where a huge percentage of people didn't even speak English, and my mom made house visits, yet I still saw encyclopedia sets in people's houses. Maybe they'd be missing a lot of volumes, and maybe they were so old they were practically family heirlooms, and that goes to show just how proud people were of their encyclopedias-- you'd even give them to your children when they grew up.

Nowadays though, this concept is hilarious. I'm old enough to have lived through multiple sets of encyclopedias, and I used to absolutely love it when the yearly update editions would come, because I found them much more fascinating than the encyclopedias themselves, since they were more timely and more specific. So even though I lived through it, I find this idea hilarious, that people would actually pay that much money for these fucking things that took up so much room-- and really, how often did you use them? And if you did use them for homework-- and that's an if, because more than likely your set was outdated and you needed to use the school library-- seriously, how often was this? Three times a year? And while you needed them for school, how often did your parents use them? Ever?

I am positive that when my children get old enough to do papers and need to look up stuff, the concept that we all owned our own encyclopedias-- instead of just going to the library, which won't be going away for a long time yet-- will be inconceivable.
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with love from CRS @ 3:52 AM 

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