How quickly information ages - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

On the bottom shelf of our bookcase in the living room sit 22 volumes of The Illustrated Columbia Encyclopedia, plus annual updates covering the years 1975-1980.

 

I remember I bought the encyclopedia years ago when the Blyth Festival held its annual book sale the first week of June. I had grown up with an encyclopedia in the house and missed it. My mother, a woman who valued education, had bought an encyclopedia, although she was so short on cash I’m not sure how she managed.

 

On another book shelf, we have four volumes of the Canadian Encyclopedia from Mel Hurtig, which has a total of 10 million users and more than 43 million page views

 

But at the time Mr. Hurtig began thinking of an encyclopedia in the early 1970s, that enthusiasm was not obvious to everyone. In his memoirs - one section of which is aptly titled “The Perils of Publishing” - he recalls visiting a school in Saskatchewan and finding this situation in the library: “There were very few Canadian books. All of the reference books and encyclopedias were American.… Canadian content in the three different American encyclopedias on the shelves was hopelessly inadequate… and often full of egregious errors.”

 

Mr. Hurtig, a longtime Edmonton resident and successful bookstore owner turned publisher, vowed to change that - and did. The scale of his vision has often been described as “the biggest publishing project in Canadian history.” The initial budget, in 1970s dollars, was almost $2.6 million. 

 

And yet, if you ask a young person today what an encyclopedia is, they wouldn’t understand what it means - unless they looked it up on Google. Computers have changed everything.

 

I was wondering one day if you could print Google out, how many volumes it would make. It’s virtually impossible to think of a subject that won’t have a listing. In writing this article I’ve already looked up things on Google.

 

And then there are all the other online listings. As a movie watcher, I’m a fan of IMDB, formerly known as the Internet Movie Database, which has a full listing of every movie made, who made it and who stars in it.

 

I only have an old flip phone so I have a way of getting help in time of emergency, but my kids all have cellphones. It seems to me people with cellphones have them on at all times.

 

In fact, experts are worried about the amount of time kids spend on cellphones these days. They’re not getting outside exercise that they need because they’re looking stuff up on their screen. In some countries, new rules are being introduced to reduce the time kids spend on phones.

 

But do people remember what they’ve so easily looked up on the computer or cellphone? I’m sure a lot of this information goes in the eyes and out the ears. But then I’m sure it did when people used encyclopedias too.

 

I have to remember the 1960s’ Louis Armstrong song “What A Wonderful World”. There’s a phrase in there: “I see babies born; I watch them grow, they’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know”.

 

I’m sure my children know information I’ll never know, and my grandchildren will know  things their parents didn’t know - it’s the way of the world. Information that’s vitally important to my generation is useless to the next. I mean how many of my children or grandchildren even know who Louis Armstrong is?

 

Recently, for instance, I read a book about a nurse who went to Vietnam during the Vietnam war. How many today remember the war at all, or particularly the 58,281 Americans who died in that war? Right now I’m reading a book on a young Dutchman who was taken to work in Germany during World War II. It’s disturbing to read how cruel many of the Germans were - and yet we recognize Germans today as being amongst the most honest and trustworthy of world residents.

 

Currently, our neighbour to the south is rounding up immigrants and shipping them out - often to countries where they have no history. Is the U.S. becoming the new Nazi Germany? Only time, and American voters, will tell.

 

So it isn’t just encyclopedias that change. Information on our phones and computers that is up-to-the-moment now, will, by next year, be out of date.

 

It’s strange: recently we’ve been watching the trees change colour and the leaves fall, as they have every year since we moved here in 1975, and yet, at the same time, the world changes. We’ve updated our house to offer the most recent comforts.

 

That old encyclopedia in our living room is a great reminder of just how much our human world changes.