[Web4lib] "Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains"

[Lars Aronsson]

Tim Spalding wrote:

> Human culture often advances by externalizing pieces of our 
> mental life—writing externalizes memory, calculators externalize 
> arithmetic, maps, and now GPS, externalize way-finding, etc. 
> Each shift changes the culture. And each shift comes with a 
> cost. Nobody memorizes texts anymore, nobody knows the times 
> tables past ten or twelve and nobody can find their way home 
> from the stars and the side of the tree the moss grows on. We 
> advance by becoming dumber.

If you think of "culture" as the green thing that grows on your 
cheese (i.e. mold), you can very well imagine it growing outside 
of your cheese.  In fact, this piece of cheese becomes merely a 
temporary tool for the mold.  Humans are the cheese, but it's the 
culture that advances.  So when you write that "we advance", is 
this Tim, the human, speaking, or the culture?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se