I was born in the 70s, so I still remember middle school research papers that required no less than 4 sources sited, only one of which could be an encyclopedia. In any case, it still gives me pause to consider that I have a box with almost instantaneous access to the wealth of the world's information in my pocket.
I was born a few years after WWII. I used to have a library occupying many shelves of about 10 years of CACM, JACM, SigPLAN, and other CS journals, along with file cabinets full of copies of research papers from other journals (like Software Practice & Experience and ACTA Informatics). There simply was no other way to look things up: curious about Alpha-Beta pruning? You had to find Knuth's 1975 article on it, published in Artificial Intelligence.
Things are so different and so much better now. However, I do find that the way I can so quickly browse so many publications, blogs, wikipedia, and source on the internet means that I don't retain the information I do process as well as I did when I had to find a research paper in a university research library, read it, and take notes. In the pre-www days I had an almost photographic ability to remember the research papers I read; now, not so much. (Maybe it's age, my wife has to help me find my car keys!)
>However, I do find that the way I can so quickly browse so many publications, blogs, wikipedia, and source on the internet means that I don't retain the information I do process as well as I did when I had to find a research paper in a university research library, read it, and take notes.
Being in my 30's I agree with the sentiment; I think it is the price to be able to explore more, and more quickly.
I think that the case now is that if you want to retain something, then it is a different process than the exploration stage, while before the current state of affairs both processes were less decoupled.
