When I was at university, information was a scarce resource. The library in the centre of the campus at Loughborough was a gigantic structure, a looming, modernist, upside down pyramid which inside had the necessary hush and darkness befitting of an academic book repository. The only thing it really lacked was enough books to cope with demand.
The problem was peakiness – that lecturers would ask a group of students to all look at the same texts at the same time, and the limited run of books available (maybe at most 10 copies) would soon be exhausted. “The books weren’t available” was a common reason for the late completion of coursework (and, it must be admitted twenty years down the line, an excuse for occasional moments of bone idleness too).
I had lunch yesterday with a former colleague Tony, who used to teach. He recalled that, when students were late with work on the excuse of not being able to find the right information, his retort would be simply “You’ve got the Internet!”.
Whilst the nature of information on the Web is maybe very different, it’s dramatically changing the way in which we access, store and recall information. In another recent conversation, this time with an old schoolmate on Facebook, Barry spent some time bemoaning how the theme music for ITV’s coverage of the Euro 2012 championship (being held jointly in Poland and Ukraine) was an adaptation of a tune by a Russian (Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf”).
In curiosity I consulted Wikipedia – my memory was that Prokofiev was Russian from what I was taught in A-Level music classes. It turns out that he was born in Eastern Ukraine, which at the time (late 1800s) was part of Russia. Then of course, when we were at school (shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain) the terms USSR and Russia were used interchangeably. So what we were taught was right – but maybe seen to be wrong today. Barry’s response to all of this? “Wikipedia is ruining my life. I have to re-write large chunks of history in my mind.”
So, in 20 years we’ve gone from information being too rationed to be able to be consumed (and providing therefore a great excuse for tardiness), to it becoming so plentiful and up to date that it’s now more reliable that “facts” that we learn…
mmitII 