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Comment by em500 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, my daughter has access to more knowledge than I could have ever dreamt of in my youth. But left unsupervised, she'll spend probably 99.99% of her time on TikTok and Instagram and 0.01% on Wikipedia. Access is great and necessary, but far from sufficient.

edit: I don't know if I would have chosen differently, if all were available in my youth.

edit2: I think do know. I probably spent much more time on video games than on Encarta.

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That's up to the user. I was in the maths group for the write-offs when I was 14/15, and thanks to almost entirely my own reading I am now studying theoretical physics and writing compilers (amongst other things you tend to see on HN, that kind of stuff). That would still be possible without the internet but there's no way I could've done it almost entirely of my own volition (i.e. online resources)

In my case I'm not particularly intelligent (My IQ is probably about 110ish) but my ego drives to learn ever more difficult looking things, that and the having the attention span of a child (I've recently noticed I can barely read aloud without stumbling). Having the internet available to do that on my own terms is why I know anything at all today, I really don't do well being sat in a classroom.

I still do the usual gaming and the like, but I really don't buy that you can force people to learn if their hearts not in it (maybe my parents were too laissez-faire, who knows - if all goes to plan I'll be the first in the family to have a degree worth the paper it's written on).

My best friend had that kind of very-structured upbringing and I could just feel that I could run rings around him because I'd got to the same place (We ended up at the same University) the long way round - even though we're basically made of the same stock mentally.

That's my ode to the internet, anyway.

I spent more time with videogames than encarta. However, trying to get pc games to run in the 90s taught me how to troubleshoot computers. When I had Internet access I still played a lot of videogames but I also learned a ton of stuff from poking around on websites. The Internet taught me networking, programming, digital forensics and lots of other useful stuff.

I spent thousands of hours (probably nearly ten thousand) on Wikipedia in my youth. As someone who worked multiple jobs as a teenager to afford a computer and dial-up internet, and was self-taught at programming and other things, the internet, and later Wikipedia specifically, were amazing resources for me growing up in the 1990s-early 2000s.

I do recognize, however, that I'm the exception and not the rule in this regard.

The internet now is very different than the internet I grew up on, and it isn't the future I hoped for (where I imagined everyone would learn as I did, directly benefiting from having access to much of humanity's knowledge).

I lament what the internet has turned into - the overwhelming success of centralized platforms, surveillance capitalism, viral misinformation, etc. I worry about how much worse this all may get once deep-fakes become commonplace...

P.S. I also played video games - but overall I spent more time reading and learning/building things than playing games.

I spent a week in wikipedia learning about stars, nuclear fusion and black holes when I was a teenager, so 15 years ago. It was fun.

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