[ashark]

It never even occurred to me to look up 99% of the useless facts I now can't help but look up on the Internet. The questions slipped out of my mind before they were fully formed, but now I think "who was that one guy in that one show?" and because I know I can find out in 30 seconds or less, I look it up.

This ability adds almost no actual value to my life, while taking time. But each individual thing is so quick to find.

It's also much easier to get lost trying to find the very best resource(s) for something, wasting time on that rather than digging into what's at hand. Because it's possible to refine one's selection now, it's so tempting to do so, even if a few hours' head start on lesser works would have been a better use of time. The same extends to entertainment.

What's lost is peace of mind, focus, serendipity, and contentment. I'm not sure the benefit's really been worth it, for me. Libraries were actually a pretty good solution for finding useful-enough information, fast enough, in most cases. How much would I pay for a mini-OED-style IMDB? TVtropes? Zero dollars, probably. I might not even keep them around if I received them for free. Not worth the fraction of a cubic foot each takes up. But I've got this Internet connection and all these devices anyway, so....

[EDIT] OECD corrected to OED. I've clearly wasted too much time arguing politics on the Internet.