Nothing much happened

I had this conversation at work last week. Google makes trivial data trivial to find, and yet mildly less trivial questions like "what is a good introductory textbook on typography" result in pages chock full of useless link spam. You struggle to find mention of anything predating 1998, before which a few useful things happened... even by Hal Varian standards.

tl;dr search engines reframe the types of questions we ask.<p>And prior to the Internet, the physical limits of information didn't equally determine the types of questions we asked?

<i>but they seem blind to class-related phenomena such as the rapidly growing divide in wealth</i><p>It's still true there's have-now and have-laters. This is especially prevalent in technologies. Your smartphone will someday become common in third world countries.