Our intellectual future
I'm not so sure Ezra should be admitting this to his dedicated readers:
Google's like the brain I never had, the knowledge I never acquired. Its continued existence seems utterly implausible. But so long as it's around, I don't need to really read anything. I just need to catalogue the existence of things I might one day read. I don't so much study web sites as scan for impressions, for markers, for key words I'll need if I want to return. I don't need the knowledge so much as a vague outline of what the knowledge is and how to get back.
Meanwhile, I don't know if any of it is right. Save for the few brilliant among us, knowledge in the pre-Internet days was as fleeting as it is today. As I get older, I forget more and more rich details about books I've read and classes I've taken and places I've been over the years. If I want a refresher, I need to go back and do some reading, pull up my old notes, or flip through my photo albums. But there's by no means a category of "permanent knowledge" that stands apart from "stuff I learned on the Internet". It all disappears!
What the Internet does, is makes a wider range of knowledge more immediately accessible, and less necessary to memorize. It provides us with fast access to information that we probably wouldn't have learned at all--even cursorily--if there were no Google. And I don't feel like I read much less--or much differently--than I would if the World Wide Web collapsed on itself. At the same time, though, other forms of technology have cleared the space in my brain for the trivia I learn on Wikipedia and IMDB. I never memorize phone numbers or addresses anymore. Ever. And my ability to write and think in non-Instant Message format diminishes every single day.
Then again, Ezra and I probably both have a skewed outlook about all of this. The Internet was a pretty standard resource for research and knowledge by the time we were in high school. God only knows how people "did" secondary education--let alone journalism--20 years ago. God, that is, and old people.
Comments
God only knows how people "did" secondary education--let alone journalism--20 years ago. God, that is, and old people.
God and old people respond:
- talked and wrote stuff pulled out of their butt, with little fear of contradiction;
- saved lots of intellectual crap that was never re-used because you couldn't find the diamonds in the crap pile;
- were less fat, dumb and happy.
Jim, you're a national treasure.
Please write a book.
As someone poised on the cusp of fogeydom and new-hotness-dom, I almost never used the Internet for research in school, even in college. I went to the library and dug through journals in the periodical room, or used the library's online catalog to find books.
I think that the "person-plus" intelligence you get from the Internet is not really different in kind from the equivalent intelligence you have when you have access to a good library. (I guess searching an online catalog to find resources in a library is an intermediate step.) "Person-plus" intelligence has been accessible to most people for decades, and to people with the elite privileges of literacy and access to texts for centuries.
The Internet is just a library that has more stuff and is easier to search. Ezra always had "the brain he never had," he just didn't have it all stuffed into the same machine. Instead, it showed up on his doorstep in the mornings or sat dusty in museums and libraries awaiting his perusal.
Brian: you write "[the Internet] makes [..] knowledge [...]accessible, and less necessary to memorize."
I add: it makes the tools for organizing that knowledge accessible as well. It's this second-order effect that's even more appealing.
I too used to be a pack-rat for storing clippings and such, but without an index, they were useless. Now my indices are on my website, and I have Google indexes built up on that site, so now all the stuff I store is there, sliced up by day/month/year, and tagged in all sorts of arbitrary and useful ways. I could never have done this with any ease thirty years ago.
When JimPortlandOR comments that people used to pull things out of their butt all the time, I recall two instances in the past two days where I used my iPhone+Google as I was in the act of conversation to add to/correct my opinions before I delivered them.
My brother-in-law has a speech interface on his fancy-schmancy phone and it allows him to 'speak' to Google and learn what he needs.
These are still very obnoxious ways to interact with the 'hive mind' that is the Internet, but the very rate of change is accelerating, and I'll wager an (inflation-adjusted) dollar that when you write your next post on this in about five years, we will not even remember the clumsiness of the present moment.
That all seems quite correct, Lissa
Post A Comment