My grandfather was a waterman on the Chesapeake Bay. Didn't graduate high school, didn't go to college. Worked on the water until a few months before he died.
After his death, my family went through his belongings to sort out what people wanted and what should be included in the estate sale.
In the living room, there was the obligatory wall-sized, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. You probably know the one from your grandparent's house. Filled with the kind of books you'd expect: encyclopedia, book of the month, condensed versions of great books, random novels, et cetera.
Rifling through the first book, I noticed there were notes written in the margins. About every 5-20 pages. Sometimes short, sometimes longer. I smiled and carefully set the book aside.
But the next one had notes too. And the next. And the next. Almost every book in the entire bookshelf.
My grandfather was a quiet man by the time I knew him. Of the ten words over dinner sort. But whenever I find myself reflexively going through Facebook or whatever other quick fix the internet affords me, I imagine him coming in after a long day of physical work, opening a book to his bookmark, and reading and noting a few more pages. Every day.
This is nice story but how is this any different than looking at wikipedia for a bit, reading and making notes on a kindle, etc. Your grandpa sounds like the type to use tools for personal enrichment so shouldn't the tools not matter?
IMHO, Wikipedia is mile wide and half a mile deep.
Apart from knowledge special to a particular thing, it contains pretty much everything. If you ever think it is not the case, it is certainly the place to put your additions to instead of your private bookmark.
I'll grant that Wikipedia has certainly gotten better. (And continues to do so!)
But it still tends to have large blind spots where the source is (a) pre-digital or (b) of interest to a relatively small total number of people.
Try heading to your local library or a used book store (Goodwill works in the US), find a technical or history book older than ~1980, then attempt to find the content in Wikipedia. Especially in history, the hit rate isn't good.
> the place to put your additions to instead of your private bookmark
My private bookmarks won't get deleted by a zealous reviewer five minutes later.
It can be hard to contribute to Wikipedia without enmeshing yourself in the politics of it to protect your contributions from deletionists. This gets covered every few months on HN.
I really value Wikipedia but I have to agree. Also I agree that most of the world's useful knowledge isn't directly accessible online - though most of it may now be said to exist in some digital format, somewhere.
In the late 19th century there was a strong drive in academic history towards the idea of "total history": comprehensive accounts of everything that mattered from the beginning of recorded history to the current day. All these incredibly well educated German historians started outputting 20 volume world histories.
And no-one except a historiographical specialist would read them now.
Most misses out on an enormous number (at least half the books on my shelves, and I'm no bibliophile.) Google's got them, even though they can't let us see them.
I think that this an overstated case. Back in the "dawn" of online education I worked for a university where one school was swapping to using iPads for all their reading. You sign up you get and iPad with all your textbooks on it.
Initial polling was that students hated it from the get go. They wanted, needed textbooks. At the end of the first semester they did the polls again and, surprise, nobody wanted to go back to dead trees. Books are expensive and text search is amazing.
We switched to laptops for every student when I was in high school. I'd say that, even pre-Facebook, it was a boon to increasing computer knowledge, a decrease to attention span, and about equal on educational outcome.
I loved being able to play ROMs during class, but the difference between looking at information on the screen and in a book? Not fundamentally different.
I'd say where digital information shines is in post-secondary education where you're beginning to perform self-directed research, for the reasons you mentioned. And some students have a modicum of self control by then... ;)
After his death, my family went through his belongings to sort out what people wanted and what should be included in the estate sale.
In the living room, there was the obligatory wall-sized, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. You probably know the one from your grandparent's house. Filled with the kind of books you'd expect: encyclopedia, book of the month, condensed versions of great books, random novels, et cetera.
Rifling through the first book, I noticed there were notes written in the margins. About every 5-20 pages. Sometimes short, sometimes longer. I smiled and carefully set the book aside.
But the next one had notes too. And the next. And the next. Almost every book in the entire bookshelf.
My grandfather was a quiet man by the time I knew him. Of the ten words over dinner sort. But whenever I find myself reflexively going through Facebook or whatever other quick fix the internet affords me, I imagine him coming in after a long day of physical work, opening a book to his bookmark, and reading and noting a few more pages. Every day.
Then I try to be more like that person.