Is it just me or the way we use our brains has forever been altered by everyday use online tools, gadgets and gizmos? I know I might be a little late to the party with this reflection, but it has only recently come to my attention. Is it for good? Is it for better?
When I started my development career, Google was a few years away of seeing the light, forums did not exist, Netscape was the geek’s browser of choice and only a few select websites could provide any kind of information on development, and that was if you could get to them. So a lot of what you learned, you learned from a book, or the occasional tutorial CD or a savvy tutor near you. But whatever the source was, you committed it to memory. A few months ago I had to get my hands dirty again with some coding and I found myself searching for the same PHP command I had used two days before, because … well… it was two clicks away so why bother memorizing it?
Looking beyond code, the Google + Wikipedia combo has made me lazy all the while freeing up a considerable amount of my brain cells formerly used to memorize stuff about geography, history, literature, or whatever topic. Now, thru a mixture of my own laziness and the fact that the info is at the tip of my fingers, I don’t make the slightest effort to memorize anything anymore.
Another example of external memory: When I was ten years old I could remember maybe ten to fifteen phone numbers by heart (all landlines mind you). Those were basically all the phone numbers that made up my ten year old universe: family, close friends, and not much more. Now I barely have three or four including my own cell phone and the rest are in my blackberry’s address book. I honestly have trouble remembering my home landline and I’m pretty sure ten years from now I will remember one at most or none at all.
So what are we doing with all these extra brain space?
Although we have more available brain space we are also bombarded with a lot more stuff than before and I for one, blame Twitter for this. Twitter has given us access to whomever we care to watch and those individuals use twitter to share a lot of the stuff (links, articles, thoughts, phrases, quotes, pics, etc.) that they find interesting. By transition we would be inclined to find those things interesting as well. I could make a safe bet that if you were to follow all the links and info published on any given day by the people you follow, you could do nothing else in the day.
I find this information overload plus laziness to remember is slowly killing a part of our passion. Whether it is a movie, a book or a music album, everything is out there so fast that you cannot even build the desire and once you have it, you do not enjoy it quite as much as we did in the old days.
Is our passion dying? Or is it shifting? And if so… where? In my case I have yet to figure that out.
Shuje
On my next post I will make you cry and laugh, and then cry again. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on this. Are we losing our passion? Is Wikipedia making us dumber or is it that I am so dumb I’m missing something?
Posted by shuje 
