I suddenly realized how dependent I have become. As I blogged earlier, we cut the cable cord recently – deciding instead to rely on streaming technology for our TV entertainment.  What I failed to consider are the ramifications of Internet service disruptions.

We lost our Internet service on Friday. And life as we knew it pretty much stopped. Our TV went dark. Our smart phones became dumb. And so did I. I couldn’t ask Alexa for a weather report. I couldn’t google a recipe to make for that night’s dinner. I couldn’t visit any of the apps that I use on a daily basis. I had no way of finding out what my Facebook friends were doing. I was alone and adrift in an online world that was suddenly out of my reach.

The lack of Google especially troubled me. I was struck with the realization that I went from being intelligent to being clueless in the blink of an eye. It turns out my IQ may be based on my ability to find information quickly via search engines. Without them, I am shocked at how little I’ve retained from all that I’ve once learned.  But perhaps that is what intelligence is: the ability to gather information and disseminate the pertinent details from the irrelevant ones. It is what I’ve always done.

Before Google, I still had my resources to get information. In my day, most people were divided into two camps. The Encyclopedia Britannica group and The World Book folks. My family fell into the latter camp. We had the full set of World Books and opted to receive the yearly recap edition – a highly anticipated occurrence in the Ondrasik household.

Thinking back on it, I was just as dependent upon The World Book back then as I am on Google today. My A+ third grade report on frogs would not have been possible without the help of the F volume of the World Book. I even traced my cover illustration from the picture within its pages.

The World Book was as much a part of my cultural upbringing as Google is for today’s generation. We just didn’t make a verb out of it. We never said something like, “I don’t know, let me World Book it.” My generation didn’t make up words… except for “groovy” for which I have no logical explanation.

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of film, videotapes, audio recordings, photos, negatives and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website.