I used to be special (or: Video Killed The Radio Star) - Speaker for the Diodes — LiveJournal

03:46 pm - I used to be special (or: Video Killed The Radio Star)

Once upon a time, I was special. I had a special talent and resources that others found startling and useful.

There was a time, when I was much shorter than I am now, when I was one of the people who seemed to know a lot of odd, eclectic stuff. Not amazingly so most of the time, though my father and one of his friends were impressed that whenever their conversations in my presence turned to new developments in science or technology, I would run off to my bedroom and reappear seconds later holding an issue of Popular Science open to an article on whatever interesting thing they'd been talking about. But that wasn't as amazing as it seemed, and soon my collection of back issues outstripped my ability to remember dates and page numbers.

Later, in middle school and high school, I still had a rather odd assortment of sometimes-obscure facts in my head, but wasn't so unusual compared to my friends. (Admittedly, we were all a bit unusual, but I didn't stand out in that regard.)

No, what made me special was a little later, when for many years I was the person to ask random questions to, not because I knew all the answers, but because I always knew somebody else who did. I'd accumulated such a diverse, and diversely educated (and diversely hobbied) collection of friends and acquaintances, and knew enough of their interests and skills, that I really could, for forty-nine out of fifty obscure-seeming questions asked of me, phone or email someone I knew who would either know the answer or know where to look it up. People were frequently quite impressed.

My specialness started to fade sometime after a lot of my friends wound up on the same mailing list. I got lazy; for a lot of questions I could just "ask the list". (For some reason this worked better than than on Usenet.) So could anybody else who knew about the mailing list. So I only seemed special to friends who didn't know a lot of people on that mailing list. (Note that the same list remains useful in the same way a couple of decades later (give or take a few years).)

Then came Archie. Archie (and Veronica, but I mostly just used Archie) made it easier to find certain kinds of things if you were a geek or sufficiently geeklike. And I became a little less special still.

Then came the web. A curiosity at first, then "gee this would be a really neat research tool if only more of what I was looking for had already been put on it", then "wow, useful but still has huge holes in it, but how do you find anything?" It was still useful to know people who'd have the information I wanted bookmarked, but I was a lot less special than I had been.

And then came search engines. And I was no longer special at all. In fact, while I am decently skilled in the use of search engines, I know several people who are able to use them much more effectively than I do. Yeah, there are people who don't think to "SFTW" right away, or who just aren't as good at (or as comfortable with, even if they're otherwise clueful) using search engines. And newbies to be taught. And the occasional person around whom heisenbugs seem to like to collect, resulting in glitchitude that none of their friends experience, so they ask others for help. But that just makes me "one of the millions of people who can help with this", not special at all.

There are subjects I can teach better than a lot of other people can, but lots of people are expert in something, so that's not unusual. (I don't know whether the number of subjects I can teach is unusual or not.) Sometimes I do my part to contribute to the new order by writing a web page on something I know about. When I meet someone who doesn't know the power of the web, I can't maintain an artificial aura of specialness, because my instinct is to teach them how to fish, not to hand them a fish. So for the most part I'm back to just being somebody with an odd collection of data in my skull, who gets asked, "How/why do you know that?" every so often.

It was fun being special. The world is better off this way, where so many more people can find answers themselves, but once in a while I think back. And I remember what it was like to be the one who knew where to find the answers. I don't need that, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it while it lasted.

(This is not a "woe is me" essay or fishing for egoboo, though it's admittedly deliberately melodramatic. I do know I've got other gifts, some of which are more significant than what I've described here. It's just a musing on how things change and how one's role can be changed as a result, and a reflection on one thing that seemed like such a big deal once upon a time.)