In 1999, one of my editors at Autodesk called me over and said, "Hey, there's a pretty good new search site called Google. You should check it out." He was a smart guy and a painstaking researcher, so if he said something was worth a look, I made time to look. Back then, we were writing about the visionary possibilities of location-based services, imagining a cell phone driven future we've now far surpassed. We're approaching singularity at lightning speed.
Now "google" is a verb, and anyone anywhere can find practically any blip of information in the blink of an eye. I'd contend though, that for most humans, information culled in this way isn't "sticky"; it passes through consciousness and keeps on moving. I call it "borrowed intelligence". Look like you're smart and know your stuff one second; forget every bit of it the next.
For me, there ought to be something sensory, something tactile for the best absorption of information. My kids roll their eyes every time I start in with "When I was your age, we went to the library and --", cutting me off and finishing my sentence for me. There's a new way of doing things, I get it; admittedly I'm pretty cutting-edge-techno-geeky myself and don't want to be hypocritical. But give me stack access over a hyperlink any day. I'd rather borrow a pen than borrow against what my own memory can hold.
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