[BITList] Stephen Bayley: Don't knock the WiFi age - it satisfiesour restless minds | Comment is free | The Observer

[HUGH]

Mike,

The age of the excessively wee electronic thing that always needs charged 
up.  Come the end of fossil fuel it'll all be scrap bar the odd one whose 
owner still has a working windmill.  Half the world I see around me are mere 
appendages to a mobile phone, and 99% of them wouldn't know how to spell 
online record repository, let alone look for something on one.  The last 
time I checked an obscure word online (yesterday) I got a selection of 
meanings, all wrong, so I used the old standby, commonsense, and worked it 
out for myself.  Almost nothing useful to me is available online except at a 
price.  Online access to books I can read for free in any decent library is 
subject to a charge.  I noted an entry in Burke's Peerage while searching 
the web, and found it would cost me £7.95 for a 72 hour pass, "automatically 
renewed" on expiry. I can get a bus to Greenock for nothing and look it up 
in the library.

And, I note the young are becoming literate and numerate in a different way? 
Try as I will, I can't work that out.  The new arithmetic : 2 + 2 = 5.654 ?

Haud me back.

Hugh.