John Miedema

I’m one of those people who is concerned about how the Internet is changing our brains. Nicholas Carr addresses this theme in his new book, The Shallows. I will review it soon. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Internet. And it’s true that everything changes the brain. This has become increasingly apparent with new research on brain plasticity. But the Internet is an intellectual technology, extending our brains and changing the way we process information. It changes the way we perceive the world. That’s not necessarily bad. Past intellectual …

You’ve heard Nicholas Carr’s question, Is Google making us stupid? Why stop with Google and the Internet? Media mogul Moses Znaimer claimed that print created illiteracy. If you think Znaimer lacks credibility on this subject, how about Socrates? In the Phaedrus, Socrates shares the view that written accounts cause forgetfulness, giving only the semblance of knowledge, making us shallower thinkers. Socrates preferred the oral tradition, and is only known to us today through the writings of Plato.
Perhaps all technologies take something away from us. Or not. Our brains have evolved …

You’ve played Tetris. It’s that fun video game in which players rotate falling shapes to fit a neat fit in slots at the bottom of the screen. Clark and Chalmers (1998) wrote a paper, The Extended Mind, in which they used Tetris to make a fascinating point about the nature of mind. The article begins with a question, “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Enter Tetris. When we play the game, we rotate the shapes before deciding the best fit in the slots. Part …

Just watched a video featuring Jaron Lanier, author of You are Not a Gadget. He pitches against Web 2.0 freebie culture, envisioning instead humans creatively reinventing themselves rather than remixing the products of others. He also rejects AI singularity zealots who predict a merger of human and machine intelligence, preferring to see humans as supernatural, distinct from computers and nature. Hmmm. I agree that I am not a gadget, but I see things a little differently. I think Web 2.0 hype got carried away (thank goodness that’s over) but creativity …

Surfing the web, pages loading, files downloading or uploading, even offline using resource hungry programs, how much time do you spend watching your computer’s hourglass spin, waiting? Unlike a book that everyone can read at once, the Internet is a stateless resource, requiring time and energy each time a request is made. If everyone requested a single page at once, the server would crash. So requests are queued, and we wait.
Sure, we have to wait with print resources too. If I am writing and need to look something up, …