Things Lost
Mar. 6th, 2009 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowThe 'Net has taken something from us.
Some years ago - I'd guess ten or fifteen - I was at the office when the name "Klement Gottwald" popped into my mind. The name seemed familiar; I knew that I ought to be able to place it, but, apart from a feeling that it fit into postwar Eastern Europe, nothing came. After continuing to cudgel my brain for a bit, I went off to talk to A, one of my colleagues. A was a Hungarian, who had fled the country during the 1956 upheavals; perhaps he would know. Alas, though he too recognized the name, he couldn't place it either. (By this time we were both conjecturing that Gottwald was an East German.) Finally, one of us suggested consulting another colleague, K. K and his wife were Poles, who had emigrated to the US in the late seventies, or perhaps the eighties. We found the two of them in his office, and K's wife was able to identify Gottwald; in her youth, she had gone to a school named for him. The four of us chatted for a while, about Gottwald, Polish schools, and other tangential topics.
Today, in a comparable situation, my first instinct would be to go online, fire up a search engine, and go to Wikipedia or some other resource. I'd have my answer - but I wouldn't have those conversations, follow the tangential chains, or, really, get any human contact out of it.
It's not that I can't do these things any more; it's just less likely, less convenient, less the obvious thing to do. Something is lost, there. Does that negate all the positive consequences of 'Net-based resources? Of course not; but that doesn't mean the loss isn't real.
Oh, by the way: Klement Gottwald.
Some years ago - I'd guess ten or fifteen - I was at the office when the name "Klement Gottwald" popped into my mind. The name seemed familiar; I knew that I ought to be able to place it, but, apart from a feeling that it fit into postwar Eastern Europe, nothing came. After continuing to cudgel my brain for a bit, I went off to talk to A, one of my colleagues. A was a Hungarian, who had fled the country during the 1956 upheavals; perhaps he would know. Alas, though he too recognized the name, he couldn't place it either. (By this time we were both conjecturing that Gottwald was an East German.) Finally, one of us suggested consulting another colleague, K. K and his wife were Poles, who had emigrated to the US in the late seventies, or perhaps the eighties. We found the two of them in his office, and K's wife was able to identify Gottwald; in her youth, she had gone to a school named for him. The four of us chatted for a while, about Gottwald, Polish schools, and other tangential topics.
Today, in a comparable situation, my first instinct would be to go online, fire up a search engine, and go to Wikipedia or some other resource. I'd have my answer - but I wouldn't have those conversations, follow the tangential chains, or, really, get any human contact out of it.
It's not that I can't do these things any more; it's just less likely, less convenient, less the obvious thing to do. Something is lost, there. Does that negate all the positive consequences of 'Net-based resources? Of course not; but that doesn't mean the loss isn't real.
Oh, by the way: Klement Gottwald.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-06 04:06 pm (UTC)This post was particularly interesting since I'm deep in the pre-20th c history of the region -- another section of the world that has dropped out of history over here, like Spain, like Africa, like the Caribbean and South America. Not important without nuclear weapons. Venezuela is important, of course, because it has OIL.
Love, C.