The Outsourced Brain
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, 3rd Party, TechnologyDavid Brooks has an awesome editorial on the growing reliance on technology to remember for us, and after the quote below, I’ll have some thoughts about what that means to us as citizens and voters.
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.Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins. When I want to look up my passwords or contact my friends I just hit a name on my directory. I read in a piece by Clive Thompson in Wired that a third of the people under 30 can’t remember their own phone number. Their smartphones are smart, so they don’t need to be. Today’s young people are forgoing memory before they even have a chance to lose it.
Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.
So, how important is that autonomy? Is it important to unfold yourself from the collective consciousness of the web? Is original thought dead? Well, I don’t have the answer to that, but as Brooks points out…he now has more time to become a pickier person. Coincidence? I think not.
So it’s prediction time!
It’s my opinion that Generation Y and the generations that come after it will demand different points of view from their political parties and the stranglehold the two party system has on us is getting looser by the month. The government they’ve built has gotten us this far, yes, but their foundations are shaky at best. People don’t buy into ideology anymore because we’re a world that is increasingly interested in ideas.
Also, if people’s lives are becoming increasingly more personalized, our two parties can not make their politics increasingly more homogenized. Because if they think voters are angry and unsatisfied now, just wait another 4 years when the tail end of Generation Y are really at the age where they become interested in voting. Things will get messy.
What do you think?
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November 1st, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Cool topic Justin. My sense is that humanity has evolved to manipulate his environment, to invent solutions to everyday problems and to master the mundane so he/she may “free up” time to engage in more desirable endeavors, or at least more presumably desirable endeavors.
All of this is relative of course, what one person believes is meaningful another believes is pointless but the simple matter of the fact is that humanity has always been striving to “take off the load” and reserve ones energy for more fulfilling tasks.
It’s a rat race of course, we as humanity tend to be that if only we could find a way to “fix this problem” or “fix that problem” that it will lead to the final solution, in which life is perfect, or things will finally be bearable. This will never occur though, we invent machines and gadgets to do the work and the analyzing man used to have to do all by himself, yet it dawns on us that inventing something that lives your life for you, for all the good and bad experiences of life defeats the purpose of life itself.
There is no Utopian solution to life itself. We must sweat, feel pain and experience the drudgery of life, because we are beings. Being is hard work. We are always searching for ingenious solutions to our “problems” but the older we get, the more I think figure out that those “problems” are part of life. I personally think humanity is losing touch with what life is supposed to be about. We have all of these wonderfully entertaining gadgets around us, but are we any happier than we were 100,000 years ago?
I certainly wouldn’t trade my post-Paleolithic existence for a Paleolithic one, but I wonder sometimes whether humanity is losing touch with the whole point of life. I’m glad I have a computer that remembers my web browser bookmarks for me, but if I had to do without them I think I could manage. No technology will ever replace the need for human love and life experiences.
On another note, I believe my access to such a vast amount of information
whenever I want is absolutely revolutionary. Never have so many people, across so many socioeconomic classes had access to such a vast amount of information. I truly believe information is power. But I also believe that people mistake information for wisdom. It’s not the information that holds the power, it’s how you act on that information. That being said, there is nothing smarter than the human being and in some cases there is nothing more naive or greedy either.
November 1st, 2007 at 2:56 pm
DC is a game of musical chairs, but the music is powered by external interests with no such term limits.
The number of candidates may change, but their purpose will remain the same.
November 2nd, 2007 at 6:20 pm
David Brooks wrote a great article. I remember my college years of long ago & how time consuming it was just to find the sources I needed, much less taking & organizing notes, compiling bibliographies, & the numerous drafts I needed to do to come up with a finished paper. It seems amazing to me today that I had the energy to do any critical thinking to make my work worthwhile reading. Today I have time to do research in different subjects, have easy access to something related I may have seen months previously, & still have room on fewer bookshelves. I can edit on the fly. And I don’t have to keep my mind overloaded with a bunch of facts that are simple to look up..
Wonderful stuff, progress! It is the difference between working hard & working smart.