Coleman Yard Stake with Outdoor Mechanical Timer

Christmastime dilemma:  last year, you bought a fantastic timer to control exactly when your outdoor Christmas lights would turn on and off.  This year, you’ve located the timer and the outdoor lights, but you can’t remember how to work the timer and can’t find the timer directions.

What can you do?  Google the answer, of course (I know a certain married couple who actually solved this same dilemma yesterday by doing so).

It seems that answers to holiday questions and myriads of other question types are only a few clicks away in our modern mobile computing age.

But, can you remember a different time when information wasn’t so readily available?

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s while growing up down South, I can remember how access to certain information was hard to reach.  For example, there were only a couple of ways that my sisters, mother and women friends of ours could gain access to knowledge about the latest “New York fashions.”  We could watch the daily wardrobe changes of TV soap opera characters like Erica Kane, try to catch Elsa Klensch’s fashion segments on CNN or take actual trips to NYC itself, which we occasionally managed.  With our limited access to related information at the time, the fashion world in NYC and other global cities like Paris seemed so exotic.

This year, when I accessed actual New York Fashion Week runway segments directly on my computer via Live Runway, I had to smile inside, imagining how excited I would have been as a teenage girl with that kind of direct access to the latest trends in global fashion.

No doubt, computer technology has helped to democratize our access to all types of information, fashion-related and otherwise.

My question is:  now that so many of us have more access to the information that we seek, what are we doing with our enhanced knowledge?

What about you?  What kind of once-hidden information has today’s technology provided to you, and how are you using the new information that you’ve learned?

Last, in this age of Big Data and in these days of information deluge, what critical information do you think remains hidden?