You guys rlly don't realise how much knowledge is still not committed to the internet. I find books all the time with stuff that is impossible to find through a search engine- most people do not put their magnum opus research online for free and the more niche a skill is the less likely you are to have people who will leak those books online. (Nevermind all the books written prior to the internet that have knowledge that is not considered "relevant" enough to digitise).
Whenever people say that we r growing up with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips...it's not necessarily true. Is the amount of knowledge online potentially infinite? Yes. Is it all knowledge? No. You will be surprised at the niche things you can discover at a local archive or library.
I’m a frequent commenter on r/whatisthispainting and the sheer number of posters who are shocked to be told that the artist of their painting is not fully described online is…a lot. Not to mention the incredible ignorance (and sometimes hubris) so many other posters there have in assuming that every work of art ever made is available online to view, complete with title and artist name!
There’s way more information that has been lost than has ever been saved. Including whoever painted some mediocre portrait they did in their first and only college painting class.
