True.
But with the barriers to research as they were in the pre-1990s, 5% of the populace routinely did “personal research” then. Now 98% do every day. With the expected consequences for both what gets researched and how well the average researcher understands what they find.
I had an Encyclopedia Brittanica, I think the 1982 edition, that I researched in all the time. Among a shelf of other reference books from a bible concordance to a dictionary of music. And I was constantly checking out library books, combing used bookstores, etc., for whatever was obsessing me at the time. I still do some of this, but the internet is handier if usually far shallower.
I think 5% is pretty accurate. Most people are astonishingly incurious. I bet if you removed celebrity gossip, recreational outrage, conspiracy theories, and porn from search terms it would be a pretty sparse array.
Agreed. And about half of what’s left would be searching for song lyrics or music recordings.
I think by research the comedian wasn’t talking about in depth academic research or something like that, but rather things like researching what is the best item to buy. Nowadays all sorts of people will spend some time searching what is the best microwave to buy. Before the internet, folks would walk into a store and just buy the one that looked best on the shelf (a few, like my dad, had Consumer Reports and would constantly tell people, well Consumer Reports said X is the best microwave).
Well, you are now… 
I watched “All the President’s Men” the other night. There’s a scene where Robert Redford has a name and he’s trying to figure out who this guy is. He’s in a room with stacks of phone books* and he’s going through each one, looking for the name. The implication in the movie is that it took hours. Nowadays we can do the same thing in 30 seconds.
A year or two I ago I finally threw out my atlas of Boston and I briefly reminisced on the process we had to go through to visit a new place:
And now it’s…“ok Google…navigate to Fancy New Restaurant, Allston”.
This did not get me where I wanted to go on my last trip to Boston. The GPS kept losing signal, sending me through 20-minute traffic to get to the wrong place, reroute constantly, and back into the same traffic. And there was nowhere for me to pull over and try to figure out what was going wrong. The place I was going was “11 minutes” away, but after 40 minutes I finally found a place to park for a minute and discovered I was “20 minutes” away. I never did make it where I was going, and just left the city.
Would you have attempted to drive if you had to rely on an atlas? For me GPS has made visiting new cities so much easier.
I kept the atlas for so long because of possible such situations but never used it. Stuff went wrong all the time the old-fashioned way, especially during construction. I got lost plenty of times because the route I planned was no longer available. I missed appointments/reservations because of traffic and I didn’t know how to get around it. Unless you were familiar with the route you had to guess at how long it would take because of traffic. It was especially hard at night because you’re trying to read a map in the dark with patient Boston drivers sharing their patience with you on their horn. It was almost impossible by yourself.
Yes, but I would have planned ahead and had directions ready to go. I likely would not have gotten lost in the first place, but if I had then I would have looked immediately for a place to stop and check the map instead of just following the voice and finding myself 20 minutes later back where I started.
Don’t misunderstand, I think the GPS is generally great and use it all the time. But it’s not great for helping you find the scenic route, and in this case I very much wished I’d have had a paper map as a backup when my GPS failed me.
Nobody can drive through Boston. Even cabs only promise to get you within visual range of your destination. The roads are changed daily, yesterday’s one way is the other way today and if you were on the wrong street at midnight you’re stuck there until next week.
When I first started driving into Boston I would always take Mass Ave until I got to a cross-street that would take me to my general location. Then I would park (hah!) and walk the rest of the way. This worked OK for most of downtown Boston except the North End.
Boston really is another country when it comes to driving.
Anywhere else I’d much rather work with a paper map than the crap on my phone. I love being able to walk out of a random hotel anywhere on earth and have a full detail map in my pocket. But I’d still rather have a paper one I could unfold to get some context. Instead of this tiny soda-straw view of the Universe.
And I’d love one where the streets actually had names on them. The number of times a Google map will show a grid (or ref Boston, a rat’s nest of pickup sticks 
) of streets while half of them have no name on-screen is appalling. If I was King of their GIS department every street in every extent would always have a name (and highway number if applicable) visible. Sure would be nice if Google’s AI was listening. You are doing that aren’t you? And what do you call yourself now that you’re sentient / sapient?
Oh good grief. There were power mowers 50 years ago, but I cut mine with a push mower (small enough) until I paid someone to do it.
I much prefer hand rakes to noisy leaf blowers.
My father organized buying a snow plow for the street in the early 1960s.
We had oil and then gas. Someone with coal can say what it was like.
We got a dishwasher in 1962, and we were hardly early adopters.
Paper routes were a great way for kids to learn responsibility and make some money. And bicycles were a lot less polluting than the current method of driving around and some poor underpaid guy throwing papers at the driveway.
50 years ago was hardly the dark ages.
Damn right. Street names and route numbers change at random. I knew my way around after 2 years of having a car in Cambridge. My office mate who used to work near Boston, had a book called “Wild in the Streets” about Boston driving. It claimed that reporters for the Globe used to frequently get lost while driving around.
It really pays to drive a junker around Boston.
When we moved to Switzerland, we brought along a reference book which was full of quotations and a dictionary. They were both gifts from high school graduation.
They were big and I hadn’t used them in years. They got recycled.
But I still rake the leaves with a rake, use a push reel mower. And I talk to the neighbors, which I’ve probably done more of in the last year than I did in the 5 previous years, combined.
We sort of want to buy a new receiver. But there’s no place to go and look at them, as the place we bought it is out of business. Even the town got absorbed by the next town. 
So we haven’t had any incentive to buy. Which is probably one of the main problems with the lack of brick and mortar stores. I buy more when I can browse in person. On a website, I won’t browse as long, and if it’s set up poorly, not long at all, and I won’t even order anything.
These are still options when using GPS - you could have done all that, you know.
Googling that yielded “Kellen Erskine”, because, well, of course it did.
That’s not ironic, that’s how it works. Species aren’t necessarily qualified to direct their own evolution. If you took a bunch of Australopithecus and asked them to design the next evolutionary step do you think you’d end up with bigger brains? No way. They’d have gone for thicker fur, stronger jaws, bigger teeth, maybe some of those retractable claws.
If you got a bunch of homo sapiens together and asked them to design the next step they’d pick brains but they might be like the French generals who designed the Maginot line, always preparing for the last war. We don’t know what the next war will be. Could be brains, might not. Come the singularity we might have thinking machines so smart that better human brains would be pointless and we’d wish we’d gone for an improved immune system.
And if you try using the T, you might never return!
Love that. Having a beer after work one day, another guy laments out loud how everyone is staring at their phone. I told him, 20 years ago I would have been reading a newspaper – would you complain about that?*
*answer: probably yes. In newspaper times, I did in fact have more than one person lament out loud that bars were for talking to people. Thing is, I never mind being interrupted. I just pretend I am if you seem annoying.