everything in the sky

This article is fascinating. It’s an interview with Frank Schirrmacher (who I’d never heard of) discussing the future of our society with regards to:

• how we are changing our information handling thanks to an influx of information
• how what we deem as important information is changing (Twitter being mentioned as the zeitgeist-measuring, and influencing, tool of choice)
• how we are offloading thinking to computers and the internet and what things like iTunes Genius and Amazon’s recommendation engine mean
• how politicians are thinking about Google Page Rank as a political tool

and more.
The part that struck home for me was the discussion of how the technology is flooding us with information and how our brains, as ‘muscles’, are reacting. During the course of reading this article I checked my email twice, my Tumblr Dashboard 5 times and Twitter an embarassing amount more. This constant information-grazing is, he speculates, the reason we/I find it harder now to concentrate on any task than we/I used to and why Twitter, with its tiny information loads, is so popular: small, constant updates have changed how we think and ushered in the advent of TL;DR. We are training ourselves, through our new information tools, to think differently.

If you like thinking or technology or thinking about how you think, please do read this. It’s transcribed from an interview, which occasionally makes it difficult going, but it’s fascinating simply as idea-fodder.

Also, if you hit the front-page of the site, you can read the reactions by various luminaries in a variety of fields, including Harvard and Yale professors, journalists and technologists.
Holy crap, you guys, Edge is amazing.

(Yes, I originally found it via Boingboing, but the current trend is to dismiss them as popular trash, so I thought I’d chime in here in case you missed it.)