Information Highway

Today

More on the power of the Internet and its capacity to inform.

I received one of those "round robin" emails today spouting on about today's over-cautious-ness with pregnant women and unborn babies, saying that we oldies survived drinking and smoking mothers and we're OK, aren't we? A little research came up with the infant mortality rates for 1930, 1950 and 2009 and showed that the rate today is 5% of what it was in 1930. So I emailed back my comments to this effect.

It does seem that the Internet provides as much mis-information as information and an awful lot is completely unverified and un-moderated. And some is downright scurrilous.

In My Day

Relying, as we did, on books, did we receive higher-quality information than nowadays? This is a very hard question to answer. Once you'd found something in, say, Chambers Encyclopedia, you tended to trust it. Verfiying the information was such a laborious task and the encyclopedia, you believed, was written to a high academic standard.

Often this was true and I've had very few occasions when I've had to say "that was complete rubbish". On the other hand, authority was much less subjected to questioning and there were very many prejudices aired in these books.

The medical dictionary, for example, said that menstruating women shouldn't bathe or wash their hair. This is tantamount to crying "unclean!" and only one stop short of saying that we shouldn't appear in public. I found that I could do both with impunity and, incidentally, felt so much better for clean hair and a bathed body.

My dictionary told me that masturbation was "self-abuse" which didn't make me any the wiser and world maps usually coloured British colonies in triumphant red as though that was all that mattered.

The encyclopedia confidently divided the world's people into three types (Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negro), which we now know is damagingly too broad-brush, and arrogantly ignored a number of obvious anomalies.

Perhaps that's the true difference between then and now; information was handed down literally, from God-like and British authorities to grateful and unquestioning recipients. Today, we can see how all the world thinks in the click of a mouse.

Not that that has stopped prejudice and bigotry from spreading just as fast.