There have been many studies and articles about the changes in the human mind due to the Internet. The Atlantic has a particularly powerful one. Even as I was reading it, I constantly found myself switching around to email, twitter, facebook, google reader, etc.
I’ve been noticing for a while that, since graduating from college where I had to memorize programming languages, I learn less and less. Why should I bother to memorize the ins and outs of every system when instead I can just do a quick google search and find what I need?
As a web designer/developer, am I contributing to this? Is this a good thing or bad thing? And how can we combat it, or accept it?
Derek
Hey Zvi, don’t feel stupid.
I believe Einstein said something like “I never memorize anything if I know where to find the answer.” I only bothered to commit the gyst of the quote to memory, because I’m sure I could Google it.
What people in our age category are great at doing is solving problems by integrating many unrelated ideas – a result of not having brain cells clogged up by rote memorization.
We are infinitely better than the previous generation at research and multitasking; leave the data storage to computers, they do it better than we ever will.
Kind of a specialization of labor, comparative advantage type thing, right?