Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking.
This reminds me about our reading where they talked about how some people have a fake sense of memory because they can just google anything they need to know at a moments notice. Google has started to show its effect on how people think.
What Bush described as “associative trails” are not a mere search history. They are links, yes, but links that reveal conceptual frameworks, that symbolize conceptual frameworks, that stimulate conceptual frameworks. They are not merely a scaffolding–though to be fair, Bush does describe the scaffolding in rich ways that probably do rise to the level of what I’m talking about here. The links are fundamentally social both in the intracranial sense–the connectome in my head–and the intercranial sense–built out of the social experiment we call civilization, and returning to it as another layer of invention and potential.)
This quote is really interesting to read mostly because it really relates to what we did in this class previously. We talked about Associative Trails before this point but this really puts it in to perspective how much the Web is more a social creation inside the internet and our minds than anything else. There was another quote a little farther down as well. "The Internet is like sensation. The World Wide Web is like thinking." The connections the Web allows us to make gives us endless possibilities to create and imagine. The internet is merely the platform.