I posted my blog from 33,000 feet yesterday, while flying from San Francisco to JFK. Being a person of a certain age, I find this wondrous.

The world wide web was invented in 1991, one year after I got married. It was fifteen more years before I gave away my hardcover set of Encyclopedia Brittanica, which I had purchased in 1983, viewing it as the apotheosis of collected knowledge, at least in a size suitable to a personal residence. The college-student couple to whom I Freecycled it planned to cut it into pieces for an art installation.

Today I can hardly imagine leafing through volumes to find mundane facts, such as the length of the Yellow River (3395 miles) or what do koalas eat (eucalyptus leaves, which you knew; did you know they sleep so much because those leaves are toxic?). Googling the river length resulted in a number on my screen. Googling the koala question gave me a paragraph, which included a reference to koala’s sleep habits, which led me to investigate further. The latter is closer to the experience of leafing through the encyclopedia, with pictures and headings catching your eye, distracting you in a productive way.

I don’t think we are distracted in productive ways very often online.

I do think combining online access with the real world can be productive. Docents often share pictures of our tide-pool finds or links to marine science articles electronically. Online meetings are great for the planet when they reduce the need to commute or fly. Without phone videos, I would not have seen the shark that stranded six blocks from my house* while we were in the air–although I would have much preferred to have seen it in person.

Obviously lots (most?) of the information on the web is incorrect, but so is the information in the real world. I hear people in the coastal redwood forest saying the seeds require fire to germinate, and parents at the Monarch migration site telling their children the butterflies fly from Mexico and back. These are factoids. To be fair, I also hear people say, I don’t know or I wonder.

Even bytes in the sky can’t change human nature, or can they? I have a book on hold that postulates we have been fundamentally changed by the interrupt-driven nature of our devices. It was written in 2010 though, so it may be obsolete.

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* I can’t embed it. Google “shark on beach pleasure point”, or go to santacruzsentinel.com.