Messing around

I love Wikipedia. I can look up any topic under the sun, and instantly find a readable article. The article will have resulted from a collaborative effort by writers interested in the topic, one that has been peer reviewed and revised, rather than edited by some higher authority. Wikipedia articles are updated within minutes of any new development affecting their contents.

I also own a couple of old standard encyclopedias. They, of course, are not updated on a daily basis. They are not updated ever (except, perhaps, by yearly supplements obtainable by subscription). And this makes them valuable to the reader in a different and unintended way: they portray the era in which they were written, now frozen, as it were, in amber.

I was just thumbing through the "H" volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, 1955 edition. The World Book was one of the better encyclopedias published at that time. Unlike the Encyclopedia Britannica, the oldest and most prestigious of encyclopedias, it was aimed largely at children and high school students, although many of its articles were sufficiently sophisticated to be of some interest to the adult reader as well.

Anyway, I was browsing the article entitled "Hobby," one of those articles clearly designed to appeal to younger readers. It was accompanied by a large number of photographs showing children engaged in common hobbies of the time. Let me list them for you, and then explain why I found these photographs interesting:

• Model railroading
  
• Magic tricks
  
• Archery
  
• Ham radio
  
• Raising livestock
  
• Pets
  
• Skiing
  
• Ice skating
  
• Soap box derbies
  
• Kite flying
  
• Building model airplanes
  
• Rigging a model schooner
  
• Cooking
  
• Wood carving


• Sewing doll dresses


• Making dolls


• Weaving


• "Trapping" wild animals with a mounted camera


• Stamp collecting


• Doll collecting


• Insect/butterfly collecting and mounting


• Collecting bottle caps and using them in building models


• Sea shell collecting


• Chemistry work in a home laboratory


• Microscopes


• Rock collecting


• Music (piano, violin, etc.)


• Fashion design and illustration


• Construction and use of homemade telescopes


• A few more photos showing "unusual" hobbies

Different hobbies obviously appealed to kids of different ages -- bottle cap collecting, perhaps, among some of the younger ones; the scientifically oriented hobbies more among high school students.

I doubt if any of these hobbies sound particularly bizarre to us today. They all still exist within our collective memory. And obviously, kids still ski (or snowboard), and they still take music lessons. But how many kids do you know who would confess to spending any time at all engaged in most of these pursuits? Or would even understand the point? A few, I'm sure. And some adults may still collect stamps or dolls, or build model railway layouts -- interests continued from childhood, or picked up as a nostalgic return to their own childhoods.

But when this edition of World Book came out, these hobbies were part of the common culture of American childhood. What happened?

I suspect that the internet and the computer are primary factors in their demise. Some of the strong urges of children to develop new skills, to learn, to compete among themselves, and to find common interests with which to bond among themselves are now satisfied by computer games, social networks, specialized software programs, and on-line music and videos. The hobbies discussed in World Book arose out of a different milieu. For example, it might well seem strange to most kids today to buy and maintain a layout with model steam trains, trains themselves having been marginalized in our world, and steam engines having disappeared -- but they still build and collaborate in make-believe worlds of their own, using software available to them in an enormous variety of on-line computer games.

Still, reading the encyclopedia article, and looking at the (doubtlessly idealized) photos of kids painstakingly building models, or mounting stamps in a stamp album, makes me feel that something has been lost. Maybe it's kids' ability to take endless pains working on a project important to themselves. Maybe it's the fact that so many of the photos show children alone, happily amusing themselves, rather than participating in a group activity. (Which is a strange reaction for me to have, because too many of today's kids use computer games to isolate themselves from "in real life" friendships.) Maybe it's just the realization that the kids in the photos are doing something slow and unhurried, with maximum focus and concentration. They aren't watching TV and texting friends at the same time they are mounting butterflies.

In reality, I suspect that kids in general may well be happier today than they were in 1955, and certainly as quick mentally. Their ability to multi-task may in fact be pushing our evolution as a species to a new and higher level. Maybe we haven't lost anything at all, except in the same sense that we've "lost" the horse and buggy. I guess I'll just chalk my feelings up to nostalgia.

After all, I'm a guy who's also been inclined to long for the days when knighthood was in flower -- forgetting that the odds strongly suggest that while the knights were being knightly, I would have been an illiterate serf out plowing the field.

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(5-18-11)After publishing the above post, I learned from (ironically) Wikipedia that the World Book Encyclopedia is still published in annual editions (but under different ownership) in a print format. The encyclopedia was last given a major revamp in form and content in 1988. According, again, to Wikipedia, it is now marketed to students 15 years and older, and "shows particular strength in scientific, technical, and medical subjects." I would not say that these comments applied to the 1955 edition, which is well written but seems to me to have been geared, in part, to students several years younger, as well as those of high school age and older.