I guess Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had it right after all — the computer age of is really upon us. Gone are the days when we would do our research in libraries, be picking out dictionaries and encyclopedias to get definitions and descriptions. Now, we can either get all the info we need through a search engine or straight through wikis. Mr Webster’s relatives must really hate this paradigm shift! I guess you can’t really “fight the future” (to coin a phrase) as I also find myself going through wikis to get the updated definitions though I’ve been born during the period when a household usually had two to three sets of encyclopedias and two dictionaries, one pocket-sized and one super-sized. Now the smallest dictionaries and encyclopedias are those in our PDA or mobile phones – and no need to go through the index, just “find” the word. Are the effects good? Or bad? ‘Depends really. Good because everything is within reach – (again) literally. Bad (or just not good) because the discipline of finding, searching and discovering has been replaced by “qwerty” and “enter”. I hope my son doesn’t grow up impatient or anything – I’d hate for that to happen. I want him to still enjoy reading books and learning the long way and reap the benefits of the faster way.

If this is where we’re at now, what more can we expect in the future? Exciting, isn’t it?

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