A few years ago, I donated the last of my dictionaries to Goodwill.  It isn’t that I don’t love words and want to know more about them, but I just never used my paper copies because it is so much faster to find what I want to know online.  Recently, I have been thinking of our dependence on the Internet, and how different life has become in the past decade because of it.

I donated my dictionaries because I never questioned that the Internet would always be available to me.  Even if my own personal Internet connection was unavailable, I can still access the information I need from my smartphone or from a Wi-Fi spot, so the likelihood of the Internet being completely inaccessible to me is very slim. 

These days though, there are talks of terrorist attacks through the Internet, and some people speculate that it would become completely locked down to the public for a time if that happened.  While having access to a dictionary would be the least of my worries then, I’ve started thinking about how lost I would feel if I couldn’t look up information whenever I wanted to.

The same goes for books and other printed media.  I no longer carry reference books in my personal library because it is simply more efficient to search for whatever I need to know online.  If the ‘net went down, however, it would be like flying blind through the world to not be able to learn and read.  Perhaps it is time to buy another dictionary.  What do you think?