The age of the reference book is dead. And it’s hardly surprising.
When we need to know something, there’s one place we always look first: Google. It can filter results from millions of websites and suggest answers in less than a second. Amazing!
No more desperate struggling with index references in book after book to try to find the information we need. Computerised data is easier to search and constantly updated. And with predictive text, we don’t even need to learn to spell the words correctly, as the computer can guess what we meant to write.
But let’s not forget an important piece of computer terminology: GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out. If the information that’s been put into the computer is rubbish, it cannot come up with the right answers. Continue reading “GIGO: it must be true; it’s on the computer”