We Never Guess, We Look It Up
We Never Guess, We Look It Up Born in 1942, I grew up in a much simpler world than the one I live in today, or so I believed during my formative years. From my perspective in 2021, however, the world probably was just as complex and complicated then as it is today. I just didn’t know it. Nor could I. Why not? Because for my generation, most everything we were taught in elementary school or learned on our own—our foundation of knowledge—was to be found on a printed page. If it wasn’t printed and on a shelf at home, in school, in a store or in a library, it did not exist—or so we thought. In contrast, today’s children and young- to middle-aged adults have grown up in an environment where information about the entire world is accessible easily and instantaneously through iPhones and other smart phones. Whereas those of us born during or shortly after World War II thumbed through tables of contents in books, especially encyclopedias, subsequent generations scrolled through Google searc...