Last night, my kids and I were watching an old episode of Family Guy (I know, right...father of the year).
It was the episode where Peter joins the Renaissance Fair to be a knight. There was one callback joke based around Margot Kidder and how she kind of went crazy. I would post a video of it but I can't find it.
Anyway, my kids didn't get the joke (hell, I barely got it), but my daughter didn't just let it go by. She asked me about it, and I told her to look it up. The only information I would give her is that the name of the woman was Margot Kidder.
As I sit here typing this, my 8 year old daughter is reading to me facts about Margot Kidder, bi-polar disorder, Vincent van Gogh, and Helen Keller. She is seated across the room with her netbook on her lap.
How freaking lucky are kids these days to have access to every piece of information they could ever want, whenever they want?
If I wanted this information when I was her age, it would have been fruitless. Maybe, just maybe, I could go to a really big library and look up past issues of People magazine to find out what happened to a certain actress, which would have led me to an encyclopedia about bi-polar disorder, and so on...my daughter just got all of that information in 10 minutes. At 8 years old in 1984, it would have been an entire day's worth of work, and that would have involved my mom driving me to a library out of town.
I no longer weep for our future.
3 comments:
Nah, go ahead and weep.
I'm no futurist or Megatrender, but I think there's a real and present danger of data overload at hand.
I love the notion of all the stuff I can dig up, as you say, in 10 minutes, from the Google. The problem for me is when ten minutes becomes and hour, becomes three hours, etc.
Used to be a whiz at Trivial Pursuit, claiming that everything I know is trivial. Sadly, there's more truth in that statement than I'd care to admit.
Ruh-roh - meant to type 'an' hour, not 'and' hour.
Naughty fingers!
I know what you mean...no one ever wants to play Trivial Pursuit with me because I am so full of useless knowledge that no one gets a chance. I have to team up with my 8 year old daughter just to have a shot. Sad thing is, she is getting pretty good at it!
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