plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

At times I wonder at the sheer extent to which information is readily available now.You have a neverland called wikipedia,for instance,available just a click away which can suck you into a whirlpool of interrelated gyaan. Then I am drawn back to those days when we had to dust old and new books in huge and not so huge libraries looking for at least a paragraph on something,we were looking for.
Would I or you have been diffrent if we had high speed internet available in our days?
Strangely, I think it was better the way it was. It felt like some discovery if we actually found what we were looking for and the value of the information led us to absorb it.
To what extent I would have learned if it would have been the other way round can be determined by looking at the generation next to mine :-)