Don’t Depend on the Internet for Everything
posted: 05/31 at 10:00 PM
In the computing world (which is everyone’s world), much is being written lately about the “cloud”. For those unfamiliar, the “cloud” is essentially where all of our data is stored that isn’t actually on your computer, such as email, flickr photos, youtube videos and all sorts of other data that we can access via the internet but whose files are not stored directly on our own computers. This saves us space on our hard drives and allows us easy access to all kinds of data as long as we have a connection to the internet.
This has allowed us very easy access to the above mentioned items whenever it is convenient. It keeps information at our fingertips literally all the time if we make use of our mobile internet-capable devices. But the downside is that we don’t have to memorize anything anymore (or, at least we don’t feel like we have to - “I can always just look it up”). But all of a sudden we run the risk of not really knowing anything anymore. We miss depth of experience. Our persons and personalities are largely determined by what we know and how we use the the things we know. All of a sudden “expertise” becomes less important because anyone can look up the same stuff. The advantage of experience becomes devalued because we assume that because we can look something up instantly, that we can immediately “know” it. We forget that processing information and learning takes integration and application in to our lives - it takes TIME.
Our growing dependency on social networking tools (the usual Twitter and Facebook, etc.) is part of this same problem. Communication in short bursts encourages small (and often incomplete or irrelevant) thoughts and a significant amount of over-sharing. We start to focus our daily lives in short bursts, which makes it harder for us to concentrate on things that take time and require us to maintain focus for a long time. How would you read and process an entire novel? Why would you if you thought you could just “look up” the parts that were important. This is a real risk for us all, and most of all for kids who are just developing these skills in the first place. This is where leading by example become important.
To be sure, social networks offer many benefits to us and they help maintain connections that already exist in “real life”. And our ability to access the “cloud” is helpful in many instances where we would otherwise be “wasting” time on more mundane things in our lives. But let’s not forget how easy it is to get sucked in to a shallow existence where everything depends on the internet - where we as humans don’t actually mean anything anymore.
Go memorize something. Pursue something that takes time. See how it changes you. Encourage others to do the same.
