I think the Internet changes the way we think

My father had a great memory. In part, it was a gift of genetics, but in part it was the result of his training in Irish schools around the time of World War I. He suffered through years of memory training through rote learning and required memorizations. Of course, small town Ireland at the time was a information poor as well as poor in money. Radio was a new technology, not widely used, and people did not have the money to spend on newspapers and magazines. I suspect that while there were great maps, they were not widely available. Phones were few and far between, and I doubt that telephone directories were there for everyone to use whenever they wanted to look up something in the Yellow Pages. Probably the best way to get a piece of information one needed was to have learned it before it was needed, and simply to remember it.

My earlier ancestor, Blind Raftery, is supposed to have been the product of an 18th century hedge school. His was a time in which it was illegal to teach Catholic kids in Ireland to read and write, not to mention to teach them history and political philosophy. For the Irish poor of the time, memory was even more important than it would be for my father a century or more later. Of course, for Raftery, blinded as a child by smallpox, his memory was doubly important.

Indeed, Irish history was marked by "Daly schools", in which a class of people who were the professional rememberers of their society were trained. The graduates of these schools would attend important meetings and (literally) memorialize their proceedings in poems. The students lived in darkened rooms for years, training their memories by prodigious feats of memory. (The name "Daly" is according to some derived from the Irish which means "one who attends meetings".) Thus Irish Catholic culture had a very deep history of training people to have great memories.

I grew up in a print culture, rich in books and magazines, well supplied with libraries. School was largely about learning from books, and learning to use printed resources for obtaining new information, as well as learning to express oneself in writing. It was less important for me to commit large amounts of information to memory, and more important for me to learn how to find the information I needed (in graduate school) to develop the habits of reading journals to keep up with newly generated infromation. Indeed, when I went to teach in Latin America, it was a shock to find how poor were the resources in printed information available to my students and faculty colleagues.

In the academic communities in which I participated in the United States in the second half of the 20th century, large stocks of information were available on demand in libraries. Indeed, I had a personal and professional library that would have been the envy of even a very rich man of the 18th century.

The Internet, and more importantly the World Wide Web, makes an enormous amount of information available on demand in ways that far exceed even the availability in the academic community in the 1950's. Sitting here in my home with my laptop connected by wireless to the World Wide Web, I have much more information available more easily than I would have had in a university library when I was in college.

If you think about it, the experience of industry with on demand delivery of parts is comparable to the experience of the individual with on demand delivery of information. Manufacturing companies used to hold large inventories of parts in order to guarantee that they could run their manufacturing lines efficiently and meet production deadlines. Indeed, they often used vertical integration of production of parts and final products in order to guarantee all the parts would be available when needed. The Internet promoted a restructuring of industry, allowing more outsourcing and smaller inventories, since the communication between parts suppliers and assembly plants was so much improved.

So too, the Internet frees us from having to have so much information in our memories and in our libraries, since we can obtain information so quickly and easily from the World Wide Web.

The new generation is now seen as multitasking. Information is streaming in from radio, television, and the Internet as well as from conversation, all simultaneously. They have much less patience with information that is buried in the story telling of magazines and newspapers, seeking more the summaries or precis. Hyperlinks would allow one to link to more and more information on the item if desired.

Multitasking may be a useful response to the relatively information rich environment provided by the contemporary information infrastructure.

Google is the modern Cybernaut's guide to cyberspace, as Virgil was Dante's guide to the afterworld. It has devoted more than 1000 person years to developing the algorithms which allow the cybernaut to navigate the web, as well as uncounted machine hours and bytes to mapping cyberspace.

The Google staff seeks to develop algorithms that make entry to cyberspace intuitive for its users. It seeks to recognize the way people use words and language, and the way that usage is changing. I would suggest, however, that our ways of thinking about access to information are also adapting to the service provided by Google.

Information literacy is increasingly recognized as important, in the sense that people need more than ever to be able to evaluate the quality and utility of information that they retrieve from the Internet. I also note that people differ markedly in the facility that they have developed in finding information in cyberspace, and in the facility that they have in using Google and other navigation tools.

We think not only with our brains, but with our "information surrounds". Those who think best have developed the habits of information processing that are best adapted to fully utilize the expanding resources of that surround. The student at the beginning of the 21st century needs to train his/her mind in ways quite different than those used in my father's time at the beginning of the 20th century, because our information surround is so much richer and faster than was his. Google thinking is different in kind than recitation!