The External Brain

David Brooks really nails an important part of the internet experience:

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 provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.

Right. I had a weird experience on Monday of playing on a pub trivia trivia team after not having done so for several years. Every time a question got asked that I didn't know the answer to, I felt this overwhelming urge to reach for my iPhone, a device I didn't have back in my earlier quizzing days. The idea of being limited to the information that was actually in my head was very distressing.

Comments

David Brooks really nails an important part of the internet experience:

Yes, a wholly novel insight that has been around for ages. Or, "Classic Brooks."

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 26, 2007 12:17 PM

It is incredibly similar to this concept:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex

Posted by Jeff | October 26, 2007 12:23 PM

Yeeeaaahh.... I guess. I don't know, I mean I recognize the value of having all this information at your fingertips. At the same time I not one of those people who thinks that acquiring knowledge has become irrelevant to being an intelligent or educated person. You should know facts, you should know dates, you should know things and not just be able to cull or manipulate data. Actually having access to a lot of information, even trivial information, informs the way you think and makes you a better critical evaluator.

Posted by Freddie | October 26, 2007 12:24 PM

Wasn't DeLong on this two or three years ago?

Posted by washerdreyer | October 26, 2007 12:25 PM

Last night on "The Office," one of the gags was that Andy started singing the old jingle, "Break me off a piece of that . . .", and then couldn't remember the end. The gag was the Jim told everyone not to tell him, and Andy kept singing it through the whole episode filling in crazy/funny/wrong endings.

This was sort of funny, but suffered from the enormous flaw that he would just look that up on the web and know the answer in like 10 seconds.

(Kit Kat Bar)

Posted by JWR | October 26, 2007 12:26 PM

Although Googling "break me off a piece of that" on an office computer might be a little risky.

Posted by just sayin | October 26, 2007 12:32 PM

The problem with all this technology that allows us to quickly access any information we need, is that it also allows people to get all the data they need to support what they already want to believe.

Mike

Posted by MBunge | October 26, 2007 12:43 PM

Plato had something to say about this thousands of years ago, except he was talking about the written word in general.

Posted by Clark | October 26, 2007 12:46 PM

"At the same time I not one of those people who thinks that acquiring knowledge has become irrelevant to being an intelligent or educated person. You should know facts, you should know dates, you should know things and not just be able to cull or manipulate data. "

True. Having the facts in your own mind allows you to juxtapose them as you like. It allows the more poorly understood aspects of human thought, what we call intuition by default, to work.

But there is something about the internet that is insidious. It doesn't just let you know less, it also lets you think less.

Having a dozen encyclopedias in a searchable medium on a computer would let you know less. But often, the internet has, somewhere, someone trying to make the same argument as you. So not only do you not need to know the facts behind your argument, you don't even need to know the reasoning behind your argument. You just need to know the position you want your argument to support. Ideally, one would read and understand an argument before adopting it, but we don't live in an ideal world.

I have been in on-line discussions with people who clearly did not understand their own position. This is very frustrating. They seem reasonable as they lay out a position which, while wrong, is supported by rational arguement. Then, when engaged, they throw a rhetorical fit.

Posted by Njorl | October 26, 2007 12:48 PM

Yeah. I liked this book better when it was called "The Next Deal", written by your competition for best whippersnapper to come out of UMass-Cambridge, and even then it was overrated.

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | October 26, 2007 12:51 PM

Welcome to 1995 and the birth of Alta Vista. You pundits are so insightful.

Let me know when you ponder what it means for an 8 year old who knows what the google/search box in firefox does without necessarily knowing how it works, has access to google via a treo smartphone, and likes using google earth and google maps.

Posted by feh | October 26, 2007 1:14 PM

Did you know that school kids are using Facebook & MySpace in place of real relationships?

Posted by Bill | October 26, 2007 1:49 PM

Reminds me of an old sci-fi story from a few decades ago (no, I'm not going to look it up), where a man who could do very basic math in his head was a wonder, because he didn't need a calculator or computer to add and subtract. But no one was really sure of the practical value of such a skill ...

Posted by Kurt Montandon | October 26, 2007 2:25 PM

You guys downthread are missing the point. And perhaps Matt is too.

Presumably, if he was participating in a home game of Trivial Pursuit there would be less anxiety, even with the internet in the next room. It's not about the externalization of information. It's about the unprecedented access to that information.

Of course you could always haul in a sack of papyrus scrolls for pub trivia in 300 B.C. Of course you could always bring a laptop to that same pub three millennia later. But you didn't. It was socially and physically prohibitive. The same is no longer true with this new generation of smartphones.

No one has ever walked around with the full capability of the intertubes in their pocket before now. (Treo? Please.) Live life with an iPhone (or to a lesser extent, Pearl) for a few months. If the internet—at your fingertips, everywhere—doesn't alter your worldview, you're probably a profoundly uncurious person.

Posted by Captain Obvious | October 26, 2007 3:19 PM

Reminds me of an old sci-fi story from a few decades ago (no, I'm not going to look it up), where a man who could do very basic math in his head was a wonder, because he didn't need a calculator or computer to add and subtract. But no one was really sure of the practical value of such a skill ...

"A Feeling of Power", by Isaac Asimov. One of his most widely anthologized works, I believe (I read it in an elementary school textbook once, among many other places).

Ironically, while I immediately recognized the story, and that it was by Asimov, from the description, I had to Google for the title :-)

Posted by Shadow Wolf | October 26, 2007 4:51 PM

It's the "Matthew Principle" at work: "To those who have, more shall be given ..." Google is a godsend to people who can remember enough facts to know where to start looking. Otherwise, I haven't seen it has had much of a positive effect on the quality of public discourse. For example, as a film critic, when reviewing historical movies I can look up on Google the facts and see how much the screenplay distorts the history. But, how many other critics do that?

Posted by Steve Sailer | October 26, 2007 5:42 PM

"Live life with an iPhone (or to a lesser extent, Pearl) for a few months. If the internet—at your fingertips, everywhere—doesn't alter your worldview, you're probably a profoundly uncurious person."

I spend most of my time walking around thinking, "I need to look that up on wikipedia when I get home." So much that I keep a paper and pen handy to note it down.

Futurists might say we're in the awkward adolescence of the technology, where it's still somewhat time-consuming to look things up, even on a handy iPhone. Although I'll mourn the death of pub trivia when everyone has a direct link to the internet hard-wired into their brain.

Posted by Jeremy | October 26, 2007 9:50 PM

Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart call it "extelligence"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extelligence

Posted by jonathan | October 27, 2007 9:51 AM