These effects of the Internet have become even more striking since I’ve used a smart phone. I now regularly pull out my phone to check a fact, to watch a video, and to read blogs. Such activities fill the spaces that used to be dead time (such as waiting for somebody to arrive for a lunch meeting)…But that’s the upside. The downside is that when I used to have those dead periods, I often would let my thoughts drift, and sometimes would have an unexpected insight or idea (Stephen M. Kosslyn 2007).
- Kosslyn elaborates upon the idea of Social Prosthetic Systems. Much like a prosthetic leg helps a physical disability, a person can extend their intelligence to someone else to help with emotion or mental issues. this relationship is a Social Prosthetic System. The article continues to show how these face-to-face Social Prosthetic Systems are starting to form between people and the internet, people relying on the internet as a substitute for memory, judgement and perception.
- The quote is claiming that Social Prosthetic Systems used to just be interpersonal and people would have breaks in between interactions with the other person but when you have a Social Prosthetic System between you and the internet, you do not have breaks between interactions.
- I feel this is mostly 100% true. from the second we are given access to the internet we no longer need to remember everything on our own, you can just remember how to find the information you need on the internet, I myself have fallen victim to this. Especially in the modern business world, a job that someone has spent a lifetime gaining knowledge for can be out witted by someone who knows how to access the information online and has a Social Prosthetic System with the internet. but this is also true outside the business world. we no longer have periods of boredom or downtime, instead we use our phones to fill time abusing our online Social Prosthetic Systems.
- After reading this article I realized how much I actually depend on the internet like a crutch instead of actually learning information. Having information at our finger tips is a good thing but people have started learning how to find information online rather than keeping information stored for later. This has encouraged laziness in our culture and is creating less people who go out and find information in the real world but more people who know how to quickly access the information. This effects our technology too, our tech is constantly being designed for ease of access, letting people do as little as possible to get what they need. Take google for instant, have you ever went to google something but after typing the first few letter it auto fills exactly what you needed? that because we are finding more and more ways to easily access information to make us more dependent on our Social Prosthetic System with the internet.
Being lazy, I am prone to cannibalizing my work: something said in a lecture will get plowed into an op-ed; the op-ed will later be absorbed into a book; snippets from the book may get spoken in another lecture. This process will occasionally leave me wondering just how and where and to what shameful extent I have plagiarized myself. Once again, the gates of memory swing not from my own medial temporal lobes but from a computer cluster far away, presumably where the rent is lower (Sam Harris 2014)
- Harris tells a story he somewhat recalls about a man during an earthquake looking for a book to take cover with, but he has so many books he cannot find it. Than admits he could just use google search to recall this. The passage continues to talk about how much of our lives are saved and cataloged on the internet and can be seen again to re-access old information (for example email conversations).
- This quote is explaining how our minds do not remember everything, but computers do. Looking back at old ideas we’ve had or conversations over the internet act like a second memory, a more efficient memory.
- This is not always true. When I was younger I could tell you what me and Tyler talked about last Tuesday during recess but now as an adult if I was asked what I texted Tyler about earlier today I would have to pull out my phone and check. When we are younger we do not need to re-access old information but as we grow up we subconsciously learn that we do not need to keep a record of everything if we can go online and look at the old information saved exactly how we left it.
- With the ability to revisit old information that more or less has completely left our memory has helped create a culture of laziness. We are constantly relying on tech too much in today’s modern world which is only getting more and more easy to use. I myself use the internet to revisit old correspondence even when it is unnecessary, almost like its second nature to the point that it is comparable to using a calculator for 2+2.
Peter Vigoda 