In fairness, the percentage of population that was allowed to vote was much smaller. The percentage of population that knew how to read was also much smaller than now. A straight up comparison doesn’t mean much.
I think a lot of women followed the issues too. Maybe I should not have said “voters.” There was more to the article than that, this was just one example.
And if you have a smartphone you can do it from just about anywhere. On balance–and I say this as someone who loves and appreciates brick and mortar libraries filled with physical books–I agree with you. In terms of access to information and numerous typical shopping tasks, the internet is a godsend in terms of how and where most Americans live. The nearest big city central public library is miles away from me, ditto for my nearest UC campus. Public transit is doable, but it’s a lengthy process, and this means I’m dependent on a car. With the internet I’m dependent on that infrastructure as well, everything from Google servers to my own notebook. But there’s a lot of redundancy there, as opposed to the one car I have. All the servers aren’t going to go down at once, and if something happens to this computer, I can whip out an old one stashed away in a closet. It’s heavy and slow but it’ll still get the job done.
I do wish the USPS had set up its own email service. We all have our email addresses serviced by private sector companies, and AFAIK they are under no obligation to continue providing free email. Google could decide to end its GMail service tomorrow, and I don’t know if there would be anything we could do about it legally. It would be good if there was an entity that was empowered and required to provide email service in perpetuity, much as the postal service does with regular mail.
Has it made it easy to find information? Yes.
Has it made it easy to be cruel? Also yes.
I have to agree.
It’s true that we know have a huge amount of information and it’s a real challenge to organize it all when - for example - selecting a movie to see.
But if we use some good tools in intelligent ways, we can do a much better job at making decisions than we ever did before.
I think the single greatest tool of all for use on a PC is something called AutoHotKey.
You can download it and install it for free and there is a wonderful user forum where you can get help when you need it. Here is the download site and the User Forum site.
https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/
What is it and why is it so fabulous?
It’s an automation tool. You can define any one of hundreds of single key combinations such as (ALT-F3, CTL-7, SHIFT-INS, … there are hundreds of possibilities). You can define each key to send text or to do much more complex activities.
You see, it is fully programmable. That means you can write very simple or very complex programs to operate as if you were typing on a keyboard. But it’s the software that is doing it.
You can create all kinds of sophisticated tools. I created some “bots” (short for robots) to enter contests. There are often contests where you can enter and compete for prizes. The first time I tried this, I won a 40" flat screen TV and from that time on I was hooked. It’s as if you have an assistant that will do all kinds of work for you - even if you are sleeping at the time.
If you’re interested, I suggest you read about it by using Google to see what people have done with this tool.
Actually, there were things called BBS systems (Bulletin Board Systems) where people could exchange messages and make posts much like we do here.
But these systems were very primitive compared to what we have today.
In the 80s, these systems began to evolve and people would pay monthly fees to join and they provided early Internet tools to search for files (called FTP) and access to chat rooms. But these early systems were nothing compared to what exists today.
I used message boards in the mid-70s (not the Internet, but international) with pretty much all the stuff we have today. Not open to all, but many of the same discussions - and same flaming.