I've thought for quite some time now (last 5+ years, which as a 23yro seems like a long time) as the internet as an extension of my brain. I've joked to friends that I simply keep a small "cache" of "pointers" in my brain to the internet where I know I can find the information if I need it but I have little use to memorize the details.
I fully understand that if the internet were to disappear tomorrow that I would be very lost but it's not something worth preparing for IMHO. While I agree with preparing for the future I do not think preparing for the fall of humanity/technology to be a good use of my time. Call me naive or stupid (or lazy), you may be right, but I find little advantage in remembering large swatches of information when it can be called up (from either local copy or the internet) at will. It's one reason I vehemently opposed the C++ exams I took in college that required me to know the boilerplate of a C++ program as there would never be a time in my life that I could imagine I would be without an IDE or the internet to generate/fetch it for me.
I'm not saying that I think this is a "more advanced" way of living/existing but just that it is the way I live/exist. I have friends who have expressed similar feelings but I'd be very interested in what both people older and younger and I think/feel about this issue.
The human brain is incredible at making connections and finding patterns. When you feed more and more information into the brain and think about it the potential for better, more accurate and more profound connections increase. You see an apple fall from a tree and understand how the planets move around the sun.
What worries me is that your "pointer latency" makes it increasingly difficult to get those aha moments. Vast amounts of knowledge at our fingertips but very little understanding and wisdom.
While some say "shallow knowledge", I say "abstracted knowledge"; just like the jump from straight-up experience to discussion to writing to books to public libraries, we can "fill in the blanks" with reasonable accuracy while upgrading to an exponentially larger breadth of information.
I fully understand that if the internet were to disappear tomorrow that I would be very lost but it's not something worth preparing for IMHO. While I agree with preparing for the future I do not think preparing for the fall of humanity/technology to be a good use of my time. Call me naive or stupid (or lazy), you may be right, but I find little advantage in remembering large swatches of information when it can be called up (from either local copy or the internet) at will. It's one reason I vehemently opposed the C++ exams I took in college that required me to know the boilerplate of a C++ program as there would never be a time in my life that I could imagine I would be without an IDE or the internet to generate/fetch it for me.
I'm not saying that I think this is a "more advanced" way of living/existing but just that it is the way I live/exist. I have friends who have expressed similar feelings but I'd be very interested in what both people older and younger and I think/feel about this issue.