David Brooks of the NY Times writes about our externalized cognitive functions. In the beginning it was only the calculator, now it is everything, even things we couldn’t think that would be outsourced:
Musical taste? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to iTunes and it tells me what I like. I click on its recommendations, sample 30 seconds of each song, and download the ones that appeal. I look on my iPod playlist and realize I’ve never heard of most of the artists I listen to. I was once one of those people with developed opinions about the Ramones, but now I’ve shed all that knowledge and blindly submit to a mishmash of anonymous groups like the Reindeer Section — a disturbing number of which seem to have had their music featured on the soundtrack of “The O.C.”
Whether such phenomena will be used as scaffolds to further our cognitive abilities, or we will merge into a mush of crowdsourced, web2.0 mediocrity remains to be seen.
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