Excellent article! It brings to mind a picture of the future with us humans as chickens in cages, reduced to clicking instead of clucking as our only activity. But, I disagree with the premise. I love clicking AND thinking together. I picture the www as Vannevar Bush's thinking machine, or terms of popular culture, as Cliff Claven's delight. The www makes an excellent long term memory. Just Google it, and wham!, there you go! Or if that fails, ask another human on a forum. And the Flow experience can be wonderful. But flow is best when the web experience goes as Steven Krug's book says, "Don't Make Me Think!". If you don't have to think about the little stuff, you can think about the big picture. But, RL can be pretty rewarding also.

Posted by: Ralph on May 14, 2003 12:19 PM

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Phaedrus and Socrates did a better job of it:

"for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

Personally I haven't seen many more people think about "big" things. Most flamage happens because of quite the opposite of most of what people argue the internet is good for, picayune issues jabbered about with zealous abandon. (Wasn't a chunk of the 90s about, as the saying goes, skydiving without a parachute, and hoping to make on before hitting bottom?"

Sounds like missing the big picture to me.

Posted by: on May 14, 2003 05:48 PM

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