As a student who had most of his school days in the 1950s and 1960s, I regularly looked outside my textbooks for information. If it wasn’t found in my parents’ volumes of Encyclopedia Americana, I’d have to take a ride to the local library. Even college, in the 1970s, was a print-on-paper experience. Book markers were a handy item when writing a term paper and fingertips were not used for scrolling.

Not long after that, garage door openers started to prevail, as did information at our fingertips in the form of personal computers. With three millennials for children, I had the eye-opening experience of homework being done on an iMac. It seemed that access to information could be unlimited, though I had some doubts about how much knowledge could be retained. In any case, here I am putting my thoughts online.

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, encyclopedias still exist. There are 14 general reference online encyclopedias that are active and free (in English), as well as 35 more of the same in various foreign languages. Despite any suspicion that they may have a taste of cultural bias, they are repositories of factual information. Social media will never be a learning experience for this baby boomer.

Douglas Yohman
East Waterboro