It's not all on the Internet

The Internet is huge and vast, full of information of all types. It's so full of information that it's easy to make the assumption that everything you need will be there. However, that's not always the case.

There's a lot of local knowledge that will probably never make it to the 'net. The information maybe useful to only a handful of people so there's not a lot of incentive to put it out there.

Believe it or not, in this day and age there still exists a lot of oral history. A friend of mine who's only in his 30s has a vast knowledge of old time lore. From the time he was a little a kid he bugged old timers to tell him how things used to be done. Now he has more old person knowledge than most old people. If you are living out on a remote homestead a lot of it is still useful information. The sad thing is, he won't write this stuff down either. Maybe he'll pass it all down to his kid.

Not all books have been digitized. There's a lot of effort to do so, but no doubt many will never be put into electronic format. My private library has quite a few out of print books. Many were never in wide circulation so there can't be a lot of them left. A few cover very esoteric fields. It makes me wonder if the information will one day be lost. Just as many books were lost during the Dark Ages, maybe these books will be lost to the Digital Age.

Then there are secrets. It's very hard to keep something secret once it's in digital form. With that in mind, there are secrets that will never see the Internet. When all the NSA spying came to light, Russia set aside their computers and switched back to typewriters. A lot of their secrets are typed out and now reside in paper files.

So just because a Google search doesn't produce the information your are looking for, doesn't mean it's not out there somewhere. Something to think about.

-Sixbears