Neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative’s birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.
I tried my own variant of this experiment by myself where I throughout the week thought of what I could remember by myself and what I needed digital access for and I found that the most basic things in my life has been outsourced to de.licio.us, Flickr, Facebook, Gmail, online phonebooks, online desktops, etc. I could not remember the most basic things about the very people that are closest to me. Most ideas I have (Even this post for that matter) holds a lot of copy/paste thinking, the very ideas I hold are seldom complete without access to Google or Wikipedia.
I wasn’t surprised, I had this presumption all along and I have had the privilege to watch the outsourcing up n close starting in the 90s and throughout 00s since I worked inside the industry that create the tools that we outsource ourself too. The connection between when this phenomenon emerged and the way global economy morphed during these years where obvious. Isn’t this a human reaction to a copy/paste economy where our efficiency is measured in our ability connect inventions, reuse, reform. No more reinventing the wheel or anything else for that matter, copy and paste and hope that the shareholders and venture capitalists will smile at you for another year.
I’m not saying that this is the deathblow to human evolution, that we don’t invent stuff anymore or even that its bad for the human intellect. It’s just that what we create on our “spare time” is the only “new” in the modern enterprise. So, during the 8 hours of work each day we teach our minds what we later that weekend practice in real life, we practice how to find information not to create and store the actual information itself.
Even if we never really where in control of our personal information (Which is basically copied by your state, your bank, the small camera in the supermarket, the car register and every other type of register out there) at least we had control over our own copy of it, this is no longer the situation and I wonder if it really would be that crazy to say that this is the best modern example of das Kapital forming the working class.
“I have seen fields…
endless fields
in which we are not born anymore.
We are grown” -Matrix
/ itcommie
Google’s slogan is “Organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful” and after conquering earth and the moon, literature and media, Google moves on to yet another madness.