To start off my Journey on the Huddlemind Express, I bring you folks this gem of an article (in case you missed it) from the Sunday Times :
Stoooopid … why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks
And for those in the mood for some extra reading, this great Nicholas Carr piece to compliment:
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Excuse these blatant attacks on our beloved Google, but it really does fall in the sights of a convenient scapegoat/epitomisation of the pitfalls of our new ”attention economy”. The internet revolution broke huge barriers in allowing us to conquer the ivory towers that once restricted us from unleashing our potential; the internet brings us the world to our fingertips, but that in turn leaves our fingertips resting on the world. How many of you were able to read the above articles properly - absorbing the concepts and savouring the prose? Do we have a habit of reading the book, or watching the cheesed Hollywood rendition? Academics find themselves struggling to keep up with the saturation of irrelevant and unmoderated content on the net today and I fear that digesting the digested into digestible chunks is detrimental not only to holding up the proud gates of truth and logic, but (as
”Distraction is the opposite of attention”. Can we still say that our lives are (now) fully optimised in light of technology advances around us? We are like seagulls, jack of all trades and the masters of none, skimming and swooping at bite-sized chunks of data : the days of eloquence, penetration and understanding are being replaced with poorly crafted user generated content of zero veracity.
Amazing, we can emailsmsmakeaphonecalldraftaletterdrinkourcoffee all at the same time!
I’m going to stop myself right there and end my rant prematurely. Do excuse if I come across as bitter or cynical, but I do like to nitpick at polar extremes to expose points as crassly as possible. As industry professionals, field experts and academics alike, I’m certain that you are all open to my message without me even having to garrulously chant it to you - and thus you walk away with a caustic lesson/articled thought to carry with you. The planets know their place, but information does not. Moderation starts with the indivual : the internet is serious business and it’s ‘’success” is up to how we handle it from here on out.
Technology might make us stupid in the sense that we don’t have to rely on functions like memory (like remembering appointments, telephone numbers). But the internet is making the collective human smarter. Which is what we need now. No individual has enough brainpower to solve some of the biggies that we have to deal with, but collectively, thinking together in an open-source model, we might.
It’s a bit like cloud computing. There might be less load on the individual nodes (read brains), because the cloud (read humanity) is getting smarter.
Great article Shane: welcome to the Huddlemind crew!
I agree Leon. There’s a gestalt that is crystallising from this environment. Changing both our collective consciousness and individual operating systems beyond where we can predict yet.
Looking at Bloom’s Taxonomy for example, remembering is at the bottom of the pyramid in our species cognitive capacity.
Swelling tides of kiddies with ADD are washing into schools. Our brains ARE changing, and as long as we’re reactively trying to squeeze them back into the box of what we believe smart to be we’ll retard our evolution.
Frankly, the way that we’ve operated before has landed us in a bit of a mess, so maybe a change of mind isn’t a bad thing.
Hey Shane, don’t know if you remember me?
What a coincidence to see you posting here! Grand article, good sir.
I gotta say that I agree with your ideas above. The collective unconscious is all very well, but you’ll find that the new age individual is useless without it. Kids are not the only ones with ADD these days, but most of us. I have to say that I also failed your ‘test’ by not reading the article through properly (which would have only taken like…two minutes perhaps?).
Keep up that good writing :)
Thanks for the feedback guys :)
Two Jacobs’, nice! Though Gordon, I’m afraid I don’t recall your aquaintance?
Check out this one - Brighton Professor says that Google is white bread for young minds // http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article3182091.ece
Do note that -
I am not attacking the principles of open source (that would be silly, regarding my purpose of writing) so much as throwing out a plea to remember where we came from.
I am not projecting my general apathies on humanity upon you so much as my concern for the re-structuring of the heirachy that was and is no longer. The very fact that I, an unqualified brat, have the same floor for speech as respectables is a testament to this.
Enjoy your week :)
Hmmm, ‘fully optemised’?… never. :-)
‘eloquence, penetration and understanding are being replaced with poorly crafted user generated content of zero veracity’ sounds a bit like a kneejerk reaction to the changing landscape - although an easy one to make these days.
Eloquence, penetration and understanding are still around, and arguable more so than ever before, be it in a new distributed and more fluid state.
Structures that don’t change are dead.
Remembering where we came from is kewl, especially if it helps to formulate and contextualize the vision of where we are going.
As for the mass of noise that is UGC, ask yourself what would you rather have, a two litre capacity goldfish bowl with a single pretty fish or the whole damn ocean?
So, did anyone else stumble on this blog the way I did.
There just happens to be a http://www.gooooooogle.com/
I am pretty sure it is owned, operated, and maintained by Google. I did a search on a random word (just happened to be “fear”) and this website was on the first page of the results. . . I find that slightly strange.