What the Internet is Doing to My Mind
You know how teachers shifted from teaching rote memorization to teaching concepts sometime during the 19th or 20th century? I think the Internet is causing me shift in a similar way with regard to facts themselves. I'm not sure if it's all a good thing, but I just noticed for the first time that instead of thinking about facts, I tend to think about search terms. In other words, my use of memory has been abstracted to a higher level: I don't recall what I need to know, I recall what will lead me to what I need to know.
Is the (known) world becoming so big that we can't contain it all in our heads? Or are we just lazier now that there is a means to offload what we would otherwise have to memorize? It's probably some combination of both.
As my memory of details declines and my construction of queries improves, at least I have the innovations of the InnerSpace Foundation to look forward to.
