search engines and the aging population

[firecat]

Thoughts on reading this post by jackwilliambell via supergee; the former post includes a link to this article from USA Today (warning, Firefox told me it tried to give me pop-ups):
"This is the Google side of your brain"

I find it interesting that the USA Today article doesn't make the connection between the usefulness of search engines and the aging of the population. More often than before, words and facts I used to know temporarily go missing. If I'm at my computer, I can look 'em up again.

Comments

[libskrat]

Andy Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs. I recommend this book whenever discussions like this come up; it's an eye-opener. Also engagingly written, which doesn't hurt.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

For me, it's things like using IMDB (:http://imdb.com") to look up the names of the actors in that movie I watched last night. I've always had a hard time with proper nouns, and being able to carry on an on-line conversation without a lot of "uh ... wossisname ... you know, the guy who starred in that movie, uh, whose title I forget, but it was about ..." makes me feel like a much smarter person.

Really, of course, it's not about intelligence at all (except perhaps the sort of intelligence it takes to come up with good search terms), but it is about storage and retrieval. The Internet gives me a vast, constantly growing storage bank, and tools such as Google give me a retrieval system that's sometimes more reliable and easier to use than my own brain.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

My friend arranish, who is in her seventies, and who has been living with memory deterioration for some time, has been using Google this way ever since there was Google and I figured out it would help. 1995? Before that she was using the thesaurus function in Protext, because if you have the almost right word, that can get you the right word. She saw her mother go down into Alzheimers, and she's such a brilliant person, and... I think it's a reasonable time in Britain and I'll phone her.

[firecat]

Thank you for sharing that with me.