How is the internet changing the way YOU think?

The Edge Annual Question — 2010

How is the internet changing the way YOU think?

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Technology analyst Nicholas Carr wrote the most notable of many magazine and newspaper pieces asking "Is Google Making Us Stupid". Has the use of the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing?

Social software guru Clay Shirky notes that people are reading more than ever but the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we'd been emptily praising all these years. "What's so great about War and Peace?, he wonders. Having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. Is the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture now finally becoming clear?

Science historian George Dyson asks "what if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?" He wonders "will books end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries and read by a select few?".

Web 2.0 pioneer Tim O'Reilly, ponders if ideas themselves are the ultimate social software. Do they evolve via the conversations we have with each other, the artifacts we create, and the stories we tell to explain them?

Frank Schirrmacher, Feuilleton Editor and Co-Publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has noticed that we are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. Are we turning into a new species — informavores? — he asks.

W. Daniel Hillis goes a step further by asking if the Internet will, in the long run, arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds? In other words, can we change the way the Internet thinks?


cont on link..

http://www.edge.org/

 

I cant remember the last time i hand wrote more than one sentence in one go with a pen or pencil.

It was many years ago.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY

Wake up slugs.

 

I've gone completely paperless where I can.

http://www.zumbox.com/

 

I am confident that I can find out about nearly anything online. I've become more aware of everything around me.

 

What TT said….

I have access to just about anything that interests me – that’s good

But then so do my teenage kids – that’s “potentially” bad

I say potentially because as always – it is my responsibility to be a dutiful parent



Regards

RN

 

That's somehow a downside of it. There will always be pros and cons to it.

 

I will say this as a teenager who is completely against the majority of censorship. It's been a long time since I've seen a parent that has some decent common sense behind them.

How parents expect the damn government to parent their kids for them is beyond me.

 

Thank You Kindly

My philosophy is we talk about everything – and I mean everything – sometime much to their chagrin :eek:


My wife and I are really trying to teach them how to think – not what…. But unfortunately it seems we are only ones

We’re constantly fighting the education system, TV, Internet, Grandparents, and friends – that are trying like hell to teach them what they should be thinking


I guess I’ll know in a few years if any of it stuck

Take Care Sir

RN

 

Good point. The parents expect the school to parent the kids, then when the school attempts discipline, the kids have their parents call the school and bitch out the teacher. The teacher backs off, doesn't want to lose their job. The kids are playing the system. Kids figure out pretty soon and manipulate both the parents and the school with much success.