David Brooks’ latest column in the New York Times, The Outsourced Brain, reminded me of a conversation I had a week ago with Dianne Lynch, the new dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.
Brooks writes:
My G.P.S. goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me
to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite
brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana.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. …Until that
moment, I had 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 sounded similar to my confession to Dianne: that I no longer worry about memorizing things, because it’s somewhere on the network: sometimes my blog, sometimes my Gmail account, sometimes my laptop or cell phone, sometimes my Twitter account, sometimes my hard drive, which I can access remotely and search with Google Desktop. I find myself blogging things that I know I’ll want to access at a later date.
We’re overwhelmed with data, with news, with information coming at us from all directions. Who has time to process it all? Information retrieval today is about access to the network.
I think this is a hallmark of the Digital Generation. If you’re 25 or under, you can probably identify with this more so than the boomer generation can.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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