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DiracPool
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I was reading an article in Time magazine in the waiting room of an allergy clinic today when I stumbled upon this article outlining the challenges and advantages of the main generations of the 20th century. I.e, greatest generation (WW2), Baby Boomers (Hendrix) X-gen(me and Molly Ringwald), Y-generation (the 90's kids), etc. The most recent one they called the millenium generation (I think). In any case, they show a picture of a bunch of kids on a lawn all engrossed in their Personal devices, ipad, laptop, smartphone, etc. And I started to think, where is this going? What are the pros and cons, cognitively, for kids who are growing up with this instant accessibility to all the knowledge that ever was. It's an interesting study.
I published my first peer-reviewed article in 1995. At the time, I was attending a small college in northern California that had an accordingly small library. Back in those days you did research by walking the isles of the library and looking for books or journal collections that caught your attention. "Googling" back in those days amounted to mining the card catalog. Remember that? For the cog sci research I was doing, they also had this computer search database called psychLit, too. Which at least was more than the greatest generation had.
In any case, once you found a book or journal you liked, there were no "links" to other articles you could just click. What you did was "mine" the references from articles you liked by handwriting them down. Of course, while you were there, you also almost invariably hand-browsed through all the other articles in the journal volume you were reading because, well, it was already in your hand.
At least in my case, the only thing that mining the references did for me was remind me that I had very few of those journals in at my library. Therefore, in order to get those articles, I had to submit an "interlibrary loan" application whereby it took up to two weeks to get the article. I submitted a lot of these. Another thing I did was compile a large list of references, and then, once every several weeks or so, take the two hour drive to the big libraries at UCSF or UC Berkeley, and spend all day there hand-copying the articles on the printer.
However, and I'm getting to the point, most of the time I just hung around my own small library and read whatever was there because that is all I had to read. Although I whined and complained about it, I found that it pushed me out of my comfort zone and I learned very interesting and useful things and different ways of thinking that ended up helping me out a lot later. Had I a laptop and google, much of that never would have happened.
So, after a long winded intro, my question to y'all is your thoughts on how this instant access to information is going to affect the cognitive development of the millenium generation? Is it going to create a super-generation of ultra-smart people since they can get the answer to any question they have instantly, or is it going to create a generation of cognitively challeneged individuals who do not have the capacity to do research creatively and figure things out for themselves because they have all the answers handed to them?
P.S. Btw, I had to send out that first article in quadruplicate. It cost me about 30 bucks, which was a lot back then. And I ended up doing that about 4 times until I found a journal that would publish it, so 4x30=$120. Not to mention the time delays with snail-mail. These days its all e-submission, instant and free...much better:
I published my first peer-reviewed article in 1995. At the time, I was attending a small college in northern California that had an accordingly small library. Back in those days you did research by walking the isles of the library and looking for books or journal collections that caught your attention. "Googling" back in those days amounted to mining the card catalog. Remember that? For the cog sci research I was doing, they also had this computer search database called psychLit, too. Which at least was more than the greatest generation had.
In any case, once you found a book or journal you liked, there were no "links" to other articles you could just click. What you did was "mine" the references from articles you liked by handwriting them down. Of course, while you were there, you also almost invariably hand-browsed through all the other articles in the journal volume you were reading because, well, it was already in your hand.
At least in my case, the only thing that mining the references did for me was remind me that I had very few of those journals in at my library. Therefore, in order to get those articles, I had to submit an "interlibrary loan" application whereby it took up to two weeks to get the article. I submitted a lot of these. Another thing I did was compile a large list of references, and then, once every several weeks or so, take the two hour drive to the big libraries at UCSF or UC Berkeley, and spend all day there hand-copying the articles on the printer.
However, and I'm getting to the point, most of the time I just hung around my own small library and read whatever was there because that is all I had to read. Although I whined and complained about it, I found that it pushed me out of my comfort zone and I learned very interesting and useful things and different ways of thinking that ended up helping me out a lot later. Had I a laptop and google, much of that never would have happened.
So, after a long winded intro, my question to y'all is your thoughts on how this instant access to information is going to affect the cognitive development of the millenium generation? Is it going to create a super-generation of ultra-smart people since they can get the answer to any question they have instantly, or is it going to create a generation of cognitively challeneged individuals who do not have the capacity to do research creatively and figure things out for themselves because they have all the answers handed to them?
P.S. Btw, I had to send out that first article in quadruplicate. It cost me about 30 bucks, which was a lot back then. And I ended up doing that about 4 times until I found a journal that would publish it, so 4x30=$120. Not to mention the time delays with snail-mail. These days its all e-submission, instant and free...much better: