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What is fact anymore? As a student with most of his school days in the 1950s and ’60s, I regularly looked outside my textbooks for information. If it wasn’t in my parents’ volumes of Encyclopedia Americana, I’d have to take a ride to my local library. Even college in the 1970s was a print-on-paper experience. Bookmarkers were a handy item when writing a term paper. Fingertips were not for scrolling.
Not long after that garage door openers started to prevail as did information at your fingertips in the form of personal computers. With three millennials for children, I had the eye-opening enlightenment of homework being done on an i-Mac. It seemed that access to information could be unlimited, though I had doubt about how much knowledge could be retained. In any case, here I am putting my thoughts on paper.
Ironically, the open playing field for information has become an arena for factual mudslinging. Exchange of ideas and opinions has turned into a repeat-after-me exercise. Fortunately many encyclopedias still exist.
Despite any suspicion that they may have a taste of cultural bias they are repositories of factual information. If general reference isn’t enough one can look online for many more websites covering 13 areas of knowledge (e.g. mathematics, politics, philosophy, science, et cetera). Social media will never be a learning experience for this baby boomer.
Douglas Yohman
East Waterboro