Through Dave Snowden’s blog, I found this interesting New York Times article “The Outsourced Brain.”
David Brooks says:
The gurus seek bliss amidst mountaintop solitude and serenity in meditative trance, but I, a grasshopper, have achieved the oneness with the universe that is known as pure externalization. Like many men, I quickly established a romantic attachment to my G.P.S. | |
Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn’t want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator. Memory? I’ve externalized it. I am one of those baby boomers who are making this the “It’s on the Tip of My Tongue Decade.” But now I no longer need to have a memory, for I have Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Now if I need to know some fact about the world, I tap a few keys and reap the blessings of the external mind. | |
In a satirical way: | |
Until that moment, I thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves. | |
The abandonment of our abilities for memory, recall, and individuality to the “connected world”, to my mind, makes people handicapped in their thinking processes and emotional development – unless people develop the 7th, 8th, or nth sense of personal skills. I wonder what these skills are. | |
With our dependencies, do we develop better judgment? Wisdom? Ethics? Or how do we replace these capabilities? | |
This reminds me of what Neil Postman says, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (1985). |
Ray Jimenez, PhD
Vignettes Learning
“Helping Learners Learn Their Way”