"I think that one of the things that people don't remember enough any more is that when the Internet and shortly thereafter the Web really took off as consumer services in the mid to late 1990s that whole universe was already richly seeded with free content that had been supplied by universities, by museums, by cultural heritage institutions, by government agencies." Clifford Lynch, Digital Collections, Digital Libraries and the Digitization of Cultural Heritage Information.

I don't know how many times I've thought to myself, what did we ever do before the internet, or cell phones? Generally I'd say we moved slower and were nicer to strangers. I still resist ubiquitous constant use of technology to solve problems, meaning I use an road atlas in my car and look things up before I leave home. This usually is pretty frustrating because most of the time I operate in this mode of instant information, along with most everyone else, so when I've gotten something wrong, I'm stuck.

The quote above makes me think of a recent This American Life episode, "Kid Politics," in which the final act focuses on a school in Brooklyn where the kids make the rules. The older kids petition to be able to use the internet and phones and other devices during "no screen" times. They understand the benefits of not being wired in all the time, but one kid asks, what if he needs to do research during a no-screen time, and he can't use the internet? A teacher gently reminds him about books. He says the internet is easier and better for research. (The kids vote for screens all the time, at least if they're over 13. Some are often seen playing video games, rather than researching.)

I'd love to argue the opposite, but we're really out of the age of unreliable Geocities-type anonymous web information. The old arguments about not trusting everything on the internet are still true but we're savvier now. The universities, museums, and other institutions that have offered free information for longer than the internet offer their holdings digitally, with authority. This is nothing new, but the extent to which holdings are being digitized is growing exponentially. This raises a lot of expectations about online access; we already pretty much expect to be able to find anything we need online.